I
want to be nice to Chuck Kinder. I want to give him a great review,
because he is from West Virginia. Although I was not born in West
Virginia, I grew up there, and I have had to deal with the most
astonishingly ignorant comments from people who either have no idea
that West Virginia is actually separate from Virginia (What
part of Virginia did you say you were from? The part that became
a state in
1863),
or who think it is a land peopled solely by unlettered inbreds of
the Deliverance ilk
(by the way, Deliverance was
set in Georgia ,
and the people in the movie were actors).
Okay,
so clearly I'm a little defensive about the West Virginia thing, and
I wanted to praise my homeboy Chuck Kinder as a fantastic writer who
has penned an amazing book. And yet, although I don't think Kinder is
a bad writer--as a matter of fact, he is a good writer--I do not, in
fact, think that he has penned an amazing book, or even a very good
one. It is not so much a bad book, either, as an
aggressively pointless one.
Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale is
the story of friends Ralph Crawford and Jim Stark, two intelligent yet
self-defeating writers who are unlikely to achieve their big dreams
of being star novelists, as they have made a second career of doing
inadvisable quantities of recreational drugs, screwing around on
their spouses, wandering off aimlessly, running out on restaurant
checks, and blathering, blathering, blathering about all the great
stuff they are going to do as soon as the world stops holding them
back. Arghhh. I don't feel I need to tell you more; I am sure you
know people just like this and probably have restraining orders
against them.
What
initially drew me to this book was the deadpan hilarity of the cover
(in retrospect, the best part of the book), backed up by approving
cover blurbs by such renowned literary figures as Michael Chabon,
Richard Ford, Scott Turow and Larry McMurtry. But I should have taken
warning from those same blurbs: Ford, for example, invokes the likes
of Kerouac, Ken Kesey and even R. Crumb. The term 'iconoclast' is
used, with reverence. Sigh. I have read Kerouac, Kesey and Crumb (now
there's a nice, alliterative law firm for you), and they seem to
enjoy writing about the pointless pursuits of drug-addled hedonists
(by turns, nihilists), so, hey, if that's what you're into, this book
fits right in. It also occurred to me that the blurbists are all
known for writing "manly man" fiction, so maybe that's the
problem--maybe I just don't have the right plumbing to enjoy this
stuff. And here I was thinking a pointless, plotless, train wreck of
a book with unlikable characters doing nothing worthwhile or even
remotely interesting wouldn't appeal to anyone ,
regardless of gender.
Sorry,
Chuck. At least I don't think it's because you're from West Virginia,
if that's any consolation.
Hey, here's a book I liked:
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