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mattlombardi's reviews
540 reviews
The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
1.0
Appallingly shitty.
I've never written a review before but I felt that, similar to this book's poorly written tapestry of characters wrapped up in a nonsense plot, I had to leave some sort of tangible warning for future generations. That said, I've wasted enough of my time on this execrable collection of paper and ink, so I won't bother structuring or gussying up this review. Here are some stray thoughts.
This book was a train wreck from page one. I counted several red flags on just the first page alone: suffixing sentences with "and stuff"; the always painfully heterosexual reading of a straight man's girl-describing-male-love-interest voice; the tacky slang; the cool and edgy music references (what a safe bet the Talking Heads reference is; they haven't aged too poorly to become obsolete, and kids today still think they're cool, but not too underground to be obscure to the average reader. Nice choice, Dave. However, the Led Zeppelin/Who nods are several leagues more banal), shoehorned into a text as a desperate attempt at seeming "with it" and relevant. Is this how an out-of-touch middle-aged man thinks teenage girls speak? The hackneyed writing is embarrassing to read from the very start and doesn't improve at all over the course of its mind-numbing 600+ pages. It reads like a high school student's creative writing assignment stripped of its page limit and allowed to run unencumbered and meander pointlessly until a doddering old fool of a publisher says decidedly, "great, this is the same length as Cloud Atlas, therefore it will be equally as successful." Someone at PRH needs to reevaluate. The back cover alone had enough red flags that I should've felt the pinpricks of pain as I picked it up; the accolades from Buzzfeed and Oprah are a pretty ignominious marking, and the phrase describing its protagonist as "no typical teenage runaway" can undoubtedly be found on the back covers of hundreds of books in the young adult section.
It's rare that such base, simple writing becomes such an arduous task to trudge through. I read every book I buy, and finish every book I start. But the lame writing style concatenated with the characters rendered so cliché as to lack any believability, the poorly structured mess of a plot, the "big boy" vocabulary words tactlessly shoved into an otherwise grade-level diction ("sternocleidomastoideus"? Just say "neck", you pompous fuck), and the wholehearted, yet unsuccessful, attempt at originality made this pointless book a dense nightmare. I wish I could manipulate whatever absurd time-manipulation powers this book's underdeveloped plot tried to piece together in order to retrieve the time I wasted reading this drivel.
The suspension of disbelief required to tolerate whatever nonsense meta-plot Mitchell is trying to peddle is unsustainable, and petered out for me at about 100 pages in. The edgy, disillusioned, sexually-frustrated, vapid, misogynist male character has been done to death by a host of better authors and even then, it's still irredeemable garbage that is solely devoured by horrible, misanthropic teenage outcasts (I'm looking at you, Catcher in the Rye. And also you, Less Than Zero). The namedropping of authors immensely more talented only calls to attention the stark contrast between the book I'm currently reading and the books that I could (and would rather) be reading instead. The number of Key Words that are oh-so-subtly capitalized to grab the inept reader's attention amassed to sheer annoying quantities by the end of the book; in this trodden-to-shit "good guys vs. bad guys" fantasy sub-plot, the Dan Brown-esque dabblers of the dark arts are called The Anchorites of the Dusk Chapel of the Blind Cathar of the Thomasite Monastery of Sidelhorn Pass. If that name doesn't incense you with rage: kudos, you're a stronger person than I am.
The worst part is that Mitchell seems like a somewhat self-aware author. His author-within-a-book character, as well as the critic-of-the-author-within-a-book character, bring up several points that can be applied directly to the overarching book itself. Mitchell literally dug his own grave with this: "One: [he] is so bent on avoiding cliché that each sentence is as tortured as an American whistleblower. Two: the fantasy subplot clashes so violently with the book's State of the World pretensions, I cannot bear to look. Three: what surer sign is there that the creative aquifers are dry that a writer creating a writer-character?" It seems absurd to think that Mitchell can't heed his own advice, but the classic battle between "churning out rubbish to collect royalty payments" vs. "taking the time to craft an actual work of art" justifies his lackluster motives.
Unfortunately for me, this was a classic case of reverse-judging a book by its cover. Or more accurately, its cover designer. I'm a big fan of Mendelsund's work on the new printings of Kafka, Cortázar, Foucault, Calvino, and Dostoevsky, among others. Unfortunately, I unconsciously associated these classics with this less-than-classic book - thinking that if they shared a designer, their authors would share a style, or at least the same level of craftsmanship. Boy howdy was I proven wrong.
In the end, this book is too unaware and inane to be parody, too simplistic to be literary, too puerile to be meant for adults, too overtly sexual to be deemed "for kids", and too drawn out to have the intended effect of interlacing several stories of several characters across several decades. A book that tries to be every genre at once will fail miserably in every aspect. Who is this book for? It's an utter fucking mess.
I've never written a review before but I felt that, similar to this book's poorly written tapestry of characters wrapped up in a nonsense plot, I had to leave some sort of tangible warning for future generations. That said, I've wasted enough of my time on this execrable collection of paper and ink, so I won't bother structuring or gussying up this review. Here are some stray thoughts.
This book was a train wreck from page one. I counted several red flags on just the first page alone: suffixing sentences with "and stuff"; the always painfully heterosexual reading of a straight man's girl-describing-male-love-interest voice; the tacky slang; the cool and edgy music references (what a safe bet the Talking Heads reference is; they haven't aged too poorly to become obsolete, and kids today still think they're cool, but not too underground to be obscure to the average reader. Nice choice, Dave. However, the Led Zeppelin/Who nods are several leagues more banal), shoehorned into a text as a desperate attempt at seeming "with it" and relevant. Is this how an out-of-touch middle-aged man thinks teenage girls speak? The hackneyed writing is embarrassing to read from the very start and doesn't improve at all over the course of its mind-numbing 600+ pages. It reads like a high school student's creative writing assignment stripped of its page limit and allowed to run unencumbered and meander pointlessly until a doddering old fool of a publisher says decidedly, "great, this is the same length as Cloud Atlas, therefore it will be equally as successful." Someone at PRH needs to reevaluate. The back cover alone had enough red flags that I should've felt the pinpricks of pain as I picked it up; the accolades from Buzzfeed and Oprah are a pretty ignominious marking, and the phrase describing its protagonist as "no typical teenage runaway" can undoubtedly be found on the back covers of hundreds of books in the young adult section.
It's rare that such base, simple writing becomes such an arduous task to trudge through. I read every book I buy, and finish every book I start. But the lame writing style concatenated with the characters rendered so cliché as to lack any believability, the poorly structured mess of a plot, the "big boy" vocabulary words tactlessly shoved into an otherwise grade-level diction ("sternocleidomastoideus"? Just say "neck", you pompous fuck), and the wholehearted, yet unsuccessful, attempt at originality made this pointless book a dense nightmare. I wish I could manipulate whatever absurd time-manipulation powers this book's underdeveloped plot tried to piece together in order to retrieve the time I wasted reading this drivel.
The suspension of disbelief required to tolerate whatever nonsense meta-plot Mitchell is trying to peddle is unsustainable, and petered out for me at about 100 pages in. The edgy, disillusioned, sexually-frustrated, vapid, misogynist male character has been done to death by a host of better authors and even then, it's still irredeemable garbage that is solely devoured by horrible, misanthropic teenage outcasts (I'm looking at you, Catcher in the Rye. And also you, Less Than Zero). The namedropping of authors immensely more talented only calls to attention the stark contrast between the book I'm currently reading and the books that I could (and would rather) be reading instead. The number of Key Words that are oh-so-subtly capitalized to grab the inept reader's attention amassed to sheer annoying quantities by the end of the book; in this trodden-to-shit "good guys vs. bad guys" fantasy sub-plot, the Dan Brown-esque dabblers of the dark arts are called The Anchorites of the Dusk Chapel of the Blind Cathar of the Thomasite Monastery of Sidelhorn Pass. If that name doesn't incense you with rage: kudos, you're a stronger person than I am.
The worst part is that Mitchell seems like a somewhat self-aware author. His author-within-a-book character, as well as the critic-of-the-author-within-a-book character, bring up several points that can be applied directly to the overarching book itself. Mitchell literally dug his own grave with this: "One: [he] is so bent on avoiding cliché that each sentence is as tortured as an American whistleblower. Two: the fantasy subplot clashes so violently with the book's State of the World pretensions, I cannot bear to look. Three: what surer sign is there that the creative aquifers are dry that a writer creating a writer-character?" It seems absurd to think that Mitchell can't heed his own advice, but the classic battle between "churning out rubbish to collect royalty payments" vs. "taking the time to craft an actual work of art" justifies his lackluster motives.
Unfortunately for me, this was a classic case of reverse-judging a book by its cover. Or more accurately, its cover designer. I'm a big fan of Mendelsund's work on the new printings of Kafka, Cortázar, Foucault, Calvino, and Dostoevsky, among others. Unfortunately, I unconsciously associated these classics with this less-than-classic book - thinking that if they shared a designer, their authors would share a style, or at least the same level of craftsmanship. Boy howdy was I proven wrong.
In the end, this book is too unaware and inane to be parody, too simplistic to be literary, too puerile to be meant for adults, too overtly sexual to be deemed "for kids", and too drawn out to have the intended effect of interlacing several stories of several characters across several decades. A book that tries to be every genre at once will fail miserably in every aspect. Who is this book for? It's an utter fucking mess.