Customer Reviews

American Desert

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Percival Everett startled me with this book. The first few pages jump out and grab you and haul you into what seems like what will be a sad story. A man on his way to committ suicide is accidently involved in a traffic collision with a truck and decapitated. All presume he is dead until he sits up at his funeral with his head crudely attached on to his shoulders by what seems almost like fishing line.

American Desert is more than just a modern day "Frankenstein" story. It is about a man who thought life was dead, only to find life in death. It is a novel about second chances and how our relationships can be anything we want them to be. In this book, we see the hurt that a family can go through because of choices a member of that family may make. Ultimately, we see that life is more than just the mundane everyday existence we know. We see that sometimes the purpose of our life can only be found when we see that we think we have no purpose.

Don't let the name fool you. American Desert is a well in the dry land of everyday reading. A good book from start to finish and an almost draw dropping ending make this book a solid form of entertainment.

One of the best novels I've read for quite some time. The premise is fantastic and Everett carries it off with style and aplomb.
His language is economical yet rich and the tone balances faultlessly between satire and sadness, with solid doses of insight and philosophy thrown in for good measure.
The narrative arc sails along at perfect pace and we are rewarded in the end with with something so rare as a proper ending.
What more could one ask from a novel?

Thus far I've only otherwise read 'Damned If I Do' (short stories) by Mr. Everett, but I am looking forward to reading more by this truly fascinating author.

Odd, existential, yet delightful, American Desert is the story of Ted Street, who, on his way to committing suicide, is decapitated by a UPS truck. However, Ted is not dead. Or is he? Sitting up in his coffin at his own funeral, Ted begins a whole new kind of life. Is Ted a devil? An angel? A ghost? The Messiah? Or, something else entirely?
This book grapples with questions of life and death in a wholly unique and hilarious way. It's laugh-out-loud funny, but also gets one thinking about what kind of life she is living and what she would do with a second chance if it was handed to her. Ted is both bizarre and relatable. His wife seems off, but genuine. The reactions of his children to this situation are heartbreaking and also incredibly genuine. Everett also gives obscurely fitting names to each of the characters, some of which are obvious, but all can be discovered or confirmed by checking Wikipedia.
My one complaint is that I wish there was a bigger payoff at the end. The conclusion is fitting, but a little anti-climactic.

What's fantastic about this book: you can learn from Ted Street to be a decent person, hopefully long before you're dead. I love the satire, Jesus 19, and the fact that I always wanted to know what would happen next. Well done, Mr. Everett!

Percival Everett's "American Desert" has one of the best first chapters ever written and it sets the tone for what's to come: a clever, and at times very funny, satire on contemporary American society and also a reflection on what it means to be alive.
After the protagonist's botched suicide attempt, he is endowed with special powers that allow him to "see" behind the facades that people put up to hide the things they don't like about themselves. "I used to be just like you and I guess that's how it is that I see so much of you. I didn't intend to be cruel, only truthful. This truth thing is new to me."
As Ted reflects on his life and as the outside world creates a phenomenon around his "return to life", Everett gives us wonderful insights on society, relationships and ultimately on the meaning of life.
A brilliant story, which introduced me to an exceptional writer. Other titles I would recommend by him are "Erasure", "Glyph", "Damned If I Do" (a collection of short stories, with a 5-star for "The Appropriation of Cultures") and "Wounded".

American Desert has at its no longer beating heart a great premise--the main character, UCLA professor Ted Street, beheaded in a gruesome car accident, sits up in his funeral three days later, no longer dead (though not exactly alive). What follows veers crazily between Street's attempts to come to grips with just what he is, his family's attempts to do the same, and the attempts by various groups (religious cults, the government, the media) to co-opt him for their own uses. The end result is somewhat mixed and admittedly somewhat disappointing as some of the stories work better than others.
The satirical sections have their darkly humorous moments, but are marred by their over-the-top nature, the sometimes obviousness of the satire, and the fact that the targets are so relatively easy.
The quieter sections focusing on Street's personal ruminations on his life and his death are much more successful--sometimes funny, sometimes moving, almost always achingly honest.
The best sections, and unfortunately the ones least explored, deal with his family (wife, daughter, son) and their views toward his "return", as well as his own shifting views toward them. In death, it turns out, is wisdom, though perhaps too lately gained. These moments of familial revelation are by far the most powerful and most moving and one wishes that Everett had spent far less time on the bizarre and much more time on the domestic.
Although it is a wholly enjoyable read almost from start to finish (lags a bit in some places) and the close is quite powerful, in the end, the book is disappointing mostly because it doesn't reach the promise of its premise and because it teases us with long moments of true brilliance. Happily recommended, but sadly as well.

It had me for the first hundred pages. Actually, less than that, since the opening few pages struck me as flip and smug, uninterested in any any more than a superficial engagement with the characters until Ted really emerges as a character instead of a corpse. It seems pretty clear that the author's sympathies lie with Ted to the exclusion of anyone else, though Gloria and the kids get a fairer shake than most (when they're around Ted or thinking about him, in any case.) As such, Everett expects his reader to identify with Ted, and sometimes I do. But as much as I get a thrill from seeing him stick it to Barbie the airheaded news anchor, I can't help thinking Ted (and Everett) could be setting his considerable abilities on bigger targets. It feels mean and ultimately pointless. It's hard to feel any real sympathy for someone who's perfect, someone who doesn't feel any pain and can do and know just about anything. At the point where he's kidnapped, around page 110 or so, the novel has developed into a very interesting study of the shifting family dynamic caused by Ted's "return." But after that, the primary conflict isn't how Ted and his family come to terms with his condition and what it means for them, but rather how or if Ted can escape from his various confinements to get home again, which, to me, isn't nearly as interesting. In the face of this more obvious conflict, the subtler questions of what's happened to Ted and what it means get trampled, and in the end Everette basically shrugs them off. Maybe it's just a matter of taste, but I would have preferred the novel to remain smaller in scope, to trade its sprawl for greater depth.

Mildly comical look at an unfortunate man's mistimed suicide attempt, his regenereation and subsequent hodge-podge of adventures, most too fantastical to believe. The author's many tangents when introducing new characters as they appear, in the form of childhood histories that only can be known from the narrative due to 'supernatural powers', makes for a slightly choppy and, at times, monotonous read. Abrupt ending.

I read this book in under a week. I am not a fast reader so more avid readers should expect to read this book very quickly. I enjoyed it. The ending worked well for me. It was thought provoking but not quite as profound as the review on NPR led me to believe. It is good and enjoyable but will not go down as one of the great works of fiction for our time. Some of the character names were lame (Lillfaman, sheesh!). This was the first Percival Everett novel I have read and I bought it only because the NPR review intrigued me.