The Last Fair Deal Going Down by David Rhodes
My rating: 2/5 cats
this book probably just entered my life at the wrong time.
i had high hopes and good intentions and all those things that invariably end in successful partnerships with books (does sarcasm read on the internet?)
after finally reading my first maureen mchugh book last week, despite owning three of her books for years and years, i thought to myself, “what other gems do i have lying around here—what other authors do keep buying without ever having read?” it came down to david adams richards and this guy. i should have gone with the richards.
i really think if i had had more time to devote to this book, if my reading hadn’t gotten broken up into such jagged stolen moments, my experience would have been better. tom fuller likes this guy, and tom fuller knows his shit. but i know for a fact he would not have liked this one.
it is a 22-year-old’s debut novel, and it reads exactly like what it is. you can feel the boundless youthful energy of it, but you can also see where its wings are still wet.
it is convoluted and surreal, which i ordinarily like, but i just felt it was muddled in a way that made it difficult to enjoy. some of it may have been my pressed-for-time start-and-stop reading of it—it took me three days to read. THREE DAYS!! unacceptable. but this may have made me miss connections and echoes, which led to my overall negative reading experience.
basically, it chronicles some horrible things that happen to a family living in des moines. rape and dares-gone-wrong, and institutionalization and tractor accidents and amnesia. oh, and also—in this version of des moines, there is a subterranean city complete with giant stone monuments and fog and creepiness, which many have entered, but none have returned.
so on the premise alone, it sounds exactly like the kind of shit i like. but it meandered and blurrily contradicted itself in places, and the overall surreality of it lacked finesse. within the parameters of the surreal, a writer has a lot of leeway, but sometimes this book read as though the surreal was just covering up for a lack of authorial direction.
i am definitely going to read the other books of his i have lying around here—this has not turned me off of him. i can see that he has a lot of potential here, and i can accept that this was just not the right book for me at this time. his ideas are solid, and i am looking forward to reading a more mature work.
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