Amusing vignettes
3 steloj
I received a copy of The Western Lonesome Society from its publisher, Conundrum Press, via NetGalley, in exchange for my honest review.
I was attracted to this novella by its quirky title and by the mentions of similarity to Cormac McCarthy and Kent Haruf - both favourite authors of mine - in the blurb. I really should stop reading blurbs, or at least believing them, as both names were somewhat misleading. McBrearty's previously published books have apparently been short story collections and I found this novella to be more short stories tenuously linked than a narrative in its own right. We swirl around in the possibly disintegrating brain of protagonist Jim, a college lecturer with serious trust and self esteem issues. Jim longs to be a writer telling his family's story so two of the threads are his own kidnap as a child, and a much earlier kidnap of two …
I received a copy of The Western Lonesome Society from its publisher, Conundrum Press, via NetGalley, in exchange for my honest review.
I was attracted to this novella by its quirky title and by the mentions of similarity to Cormac McCarthy and Kent Haruf - both favourite authors of mine - in the blurb. I really should stop reading blurbs, or at least believing them, as both names were somewhat misleading. McBrearty's previously published books have apparently been short story collections and I found this novella to be more short stories tenuously linked than a narrative in its own right. We swirl around in the possibly disintegrating brain of protagonist Jim, a college lecturer with serious trust and self esteem issues. Jim longs to be a writer telling his family's story so two of the threads are his own kidnap as a child, and a much earlier kidnap of two of his ancestors when they were children. These tall tales are interspersed with others of a young man taking a stripper to Mexico, an extremely unprofessional therapist, a child molester and mentions of an imaginary Ernest Hemingway.
Surprisingly, The Western Lonesome Society is very readable. Its vignettes are often amusing as well as shocking, but it is so jumbled that trying to decide what - if anything - is meant to be the point of the novella turned out to be beyond me.