Bill Cotter (2)

I have a love-hate relationship with this book. At first, it charmed the pants off me. Then I experienced flashes of intense frustration and irritation with the main character. By the end, I found it so outlandish that I couldn’t decide if it was a case of authorial wish fulfillment or merely a forced attempt to create a dramatic ending.

The main character, Jerome Coe (hmmh, I’m always suspicious when someone names a character with the initial J.C….) has two unfortunate conditions: 1) a mental illness somewhere in the schizophrenia family, and 2) luck so bad you’d think he molested a leprechaun.

Here’s Jerome: he’s an orphan in his twenties; he hops in and out of mental hospitals (escaped state institutions twice); he’s apparently cute if stalker-ish; and he sometimes completely loses it by hallucinating thought bubbles (like in comic books) and by going on a delusional rampage (more self-destructive than harming others.) He’s also intelligent, awkwardly naïve, neurotic about sex and relationships, and desperately means well. It’s this last quality that often leads him to really, really mess things up. Like getting-people-dead-by-accident messed up.

The good:

• Never a dull moment in the plot.
• Written with vivid attention to detail without being pretentious or wordy.
• Has an engaging energy, teetering on cartoonish without going over.
• Witty. The first half of the book made me giggle in a this-shouldn’t-be-funny-but-it-is kind of way. Like laughing at poor old Charlie Chaplin’s ridiculous scrapes.*

The bad:

• Jerome can be so goddamn hapless, I just wanted to scream at him and knock some sense into him.
• Second half of the book has some really nasty things happen, the nastiest being something Jerome witnesses the love-of-his-life do when she thinks he isn’t watching. No spoilers, but there’s something that smacked of authorial manipulation to the extent that it made me feel uncomfortable. Sexist? Maybe not but definitely objectifying.
• Last third of the book, everything collapsed for me. I was reading fast, sometimes skimming, just to get to the end. Yes, I wanted to know how it ended, but I didn’t really care about the details anymore because Cotter had lost me by this point, the story had become too far-fetched.

I realized half-way through reading this that it was a McSweeney’s Book. I’ve avoided McSweeney’s because it has struck me as pretentious and a cult of personality. Not sure if Fever Chart is representative of other work they publish or not, but I’d be willing give another book in their catalog a go. It had enough rewarding material in it to make it a good read. 3½ stars.


*If you haven’t seen Modern Times, I highly recommend it. One of my favorite movies of all time. It’s on Netflix here: http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Modern_Times/60028129?trkid=2361637
… (més)

I almost gave this book 2 stars, but then I'd have to go and reconsider my rating for Big Machine, which I just read before this. It seems like every Great Young Author I've read lately has written the exact same book: a bildungsroman about a drifter with mental issues having a fantastic adventure while living below the poverty line. I'm about to read Lowboy next, and the plot summary reveals that it's the exact. same. thing. There's another review (Rupert Wondolowski's) of this book that's pretty dead on - it starts off terrifically, but the wheels fall off when it decides it wants to actually tell a story. Cotter is clearly a talented wordsmith - a number of passages throughout the novel smacked me right in the face. But jawdropping descriptions and turns of phrase do not make a novel, and this sub-sub-subgenre of fiction is making for a disappointing crop of Tournament of Books nominees.… (més)