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matthewcpeck's reviews
586 reviews
The AV Club and The Dissolve are are my favorite pop culture websites, and Nathan Rabin is the most reliably fascinating of their contributors. His self-effacement and sense of the ironic blends nicely with his affection for the flops, outcasts, and has-beens of our fragmented entertainment universe. This book is a mix of the sort of material found in Rabin's pop-culture columns, with a candid psychological memoir. It's a tad rough around the edges, but the rambling seems apt to narrative concerned largely with obsessively following Phish around on tour while under a fragile mental state. I recommend this book to fans of smart, hilarious, sincere (but hip) music journalism, and to readers of David Sedaris and John Jeremiah Sullivan.
3 1/2 stars. Not McCarthy's best, but still worlds better than your average serial-killer novel. It plunges the reader into the world of a man whom McCarthy variously compares to a gnome, a troll, and "a child of God much like yourself", with no psychoanalysis and only a hint of backstory. Lester's wintertime saga interspersed with short anecdotal/dialogue chapters from Tennessean old-timers, which add a welcome dosage of dry humor. Just don't give this book to a girl you've begun dating.
And I'm finally finished with this rich, funny, oft-revolting book. 'The Sot-Weed Factor' is considered a postmodern historical novel, but you don't have to be a scholar of the tropes of 17th-century fiction (I'm not) to be drawn in by its complex, farcical adventure and its delectable antiquated language, which had me nearly using "S'heart!" and "in sooth" in daily small talk. Although the highbrow and the lowbrow are mixed in a hilarious and Pythonesque fashion, the relentless frat-boy dick/fart/feces jokes get a little wearying over the course of 800 pages; that's the only thing keeping that extra star from my rating. Looking forward to the Stephen Soderbergh adaptation.
The less you know about the details of the story beforehand, the better. What begins as a tense Highlands noir turns into wild, imaginative horror/sci-fi before the first chapter is complete. The intoxicating effect of this strange genre cocktail is remarkably well-sustained throughout the entire novel, with a little offbeat eroticism and social satire along the way. As in THE CRIMSON PETAL AND THE WHITE and in his short fiction, Faber is an intriguing genre revisionist. On the downside, his prose can be alternately stilted and mundane - but English is not his first language.
The vividness of the wintry Scottish setting, the hypnotic hitchhiker scenes, the unforgettable heroine, the sly barbs directed at social mores and attitudes towards women/foreigners and the term 'human being': it's all part one of the damnedest SF novels I've read in while. I really enjoyed it.
The vividness of the wintry Scottish setting, the hypnotic hitchhiker scenes, the unforgettable heroine, the sly barbs directed at social mores and attitudes towards women/foreigners and the term 'human being': it's all part one of the damnedest SF novels I've read in while. I really enjoyed it.
"There was truly terrifying about girls on the verge of puberty, Gloria thought."
Now this is the kind of book that inspires me to write. Williams' first story collection was very good, but in ESCAPES her voice is more assured and unmistakable. Except for one brief esoteric joke-story called "Gurdjieff In The Sunshine State" (I had to consult ol' Wikipedia), the 11 stories are just about perfect. Centering usually on families affected by divorce, death, a move, or stepparents, and with alcoholic young women or spookily precocious teens as their protagonists. Williams has a knack for casting the mundane amd everyday in a strange and surprising glow (and vice versa). The stories are realistic while the dialogue and characters veer into the surreal and quasi-spiritual. I don't know how she does it, and I hope there's more to come, because I'm almost through her oeuvre...
Now this is the kind of book that inspires me to write. Williams' first story collection was very good, but in ESCAPES her voice is more assured and unmistakable. Except for one brief esoteric joke-story called "Gurdjieff In The Sunshine State" (I had to consult ol' Wikipedia), the 11 stories are just about perfect. Centering usually on families affected by divorce, death, a move, or stepparents, and with alcoholic young women or spookily precocious teens as their protagonists. Williams has a knack for casting the mundane amd everyday in a strange and surprising glow (and vice versa). The stories are realistic while the dialogue and characters veer into the surreal and quasi-spiritual. I don't know how she does it, and I hope there's more to come, because I'm almost through her oeuvre...