Customer Reviews

The Boomer

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I picked this up at the library, curious not because I'm a boomer but because my father is, and read it on the subway ride home. No book, no film, no artifice has ever left me feeling as disconsolate and crushed as The Boomer. The lesson, as I interpreted it, is this: Prolonged happiness is impossible, since success is empty, love fails you, and you can't outrun your growing capacity for pleasure and acquisition. I think cars are the only things in this book that are given names.

I can't articulate a rating for The Boomer. Three stars is an arbitrary selection. It affected me -- it wounded my interior. I see my father in it, and I know that he would see himself, and yet he has never cautioned me (as the book does not caution) against absorbing the disconnective malaise of his life. Sending him this book would be an act of terrorism.

On the subway ride home: how easy it was to read something so hard.

Something about this book is chilling, haunting, funny, sarcastic, surreal and enlightning. Here is this book that seems to put the american dream on trial. It makes its point by giving us the life of a successful american businessman. He seems to live the life that we often find advertised on billboards and luxury magazines. So why is he unhappy? Why is he on the verge of "booming" out of his skull? Well, you'll have to read this book to find out. But let me put it this way: Being successful is great, but it doesn't mean diddley squat if you don't have your mind and heart in the right place. These days it seems as if friends and family aren't even there when you need them...except for your dog. It's a tough life. Even for "The Boomers."

As member of Generation Y (maybe, my apathetic generation is more aptly termed Generation Why?), I might not seem like the target customer for a book about baby boomers. Indeed, I am not. I did, however, find the book immensely enjoyable. Mr. Asher, with his vignettes captured my father's quintessence and influenced my own writing. I am an aspiring novelist and his unique brevity has helped me to think outside the constraints of the normal novel. For that, I thank him.

After I read his book clandestinely in the back of a bookstore, he came to Powell's Books in Portland, OR. I went to the reading to meet the man. He took the time to talk to me after the reading and when I mentioned jokingly that I would love to buy his book, but that I was too poor(which is completely true- I'm a starving student), he BOUGHT ME THE BOOK! Yes, it is true, the man took money from his own pocket so that I, a complete stranger, could have his book. If that doesn't say something about the man's character, I'm not sure what could.

This book is a gem! Reminiscent in form of Ken Sparling's "Dad Says He Saw You At The Mall," this eentsy novel is the newest contribution to the genre known as "flash fiction" or "sudden fiction", or, as in the title of Jerome Stern's little book, "Micro-fiction." Chapters only a small page long tell the account of this boomer's life. Every jot and tittle relating to boomers that you've ever heard of is included here. The conceits, the preferences, the loves, the possessions, the pasttimes---they're all tucked into this tale. The main character---the boomer---for all this book is so abbreviated---is somehow oddly quite dimensional. He's also a sad, tragic character, whose life is disappointing, but the book is not. It's an amazing little jewel, a story of today, a sociological study---for better or worse--- of contemporary life. The illustrations are wonderful too.

In 101 tiny chapters of 4-5 sentences each, we follow the quintessential baby boomer from birth to death through childhood pranks, to college experimentation, success as a businessman, his disintegration upon Middle Age, his death and the reaction of his family. This can be read in a matter of minutes, but stays with you long after as a representation of 20th century life. The illustrations add to the pleasure of the book. Once you start, you will almost compulsively race to finish to discover what happens to the Boomer.

Asher does it again. In 30 minutes, he took me up to the mirror, showed me where I came from, where I am, and where my life would probably go. I gave it to my wife to read - hoping she'll know me even better. The author is insightful, cuts like a surgeons knife and showed me that I am not alone. Thanks Marty!

The Boomer is the story of the everyman, living an ordinary (if empty) American life. In 101 concise Zen-like paragraphs, punctuated with kitschy illustrations, Marty Asher forces us to think about the hardest of all questions: namely, what makes life worth living? That the author is able to accomplish this with such brevity suggests that this book is less a novel, and more a work of art, which I highly recommend.

Several other reviewers have called this book depressing; I respectfully disagree. A good story is like a mirror, and what you read into it may simply be a reflection. The moral of this story, if there is one, may be to stop and smell the roses... or, in the more poignant words of the author, to learn to love in an easy, natural way. Unlike the boomer, it's not too late for you.

Marty Asher has produced a compelling book of 101 paragraph-length chapters which chronicles the life of what we assume to be a typical man of his times - a Boomer. Each chapter is accompanied by a sort of free association illustration which could have been ripped from the pages of any popular magazine in the 1950s. The result is a compelling piece of literature that says in a few words what it has taken John Irving a lifetime to write.

The book is really about all of us, however. And how we always have been. In the end Asher's Boomer, while the details of his life are different, reminds one of Hawthorne's wayward Puritans, Sloan Wilson's "Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" and today's Microserfs. Asher pulls it off in an amazing economy of words, almost conversationally, as if someone asked, "What was your father like?"

Buy this book, read it and circulate it among your friends. You'll think about it and carry it around in your mind a few days and hopefully it will sink in.

And it IS worth buying for the pictures!

As I finished The Boomer by Marty Asher last night I sensed that this book was one which would keep me thinking for some time to come. For as I read the book I became painfully aware that the main character, Boomer, is destined to live a life filled with angst, frustration and ultimately disappointment. And I imagine that most readers will feel as I did that the author has perhaps glimpsed a part of many of the baby boomers lives and written about them within the pages of this book. And how many of us born before the 60's, who lived through such interesting times on their way to maturity, have been disappointed with what has become of their lives and are now only too painfully aware of this. Expecting so much, its as if not only the boomer, but an entire generation found that all they hoped for sadly didn't materialize.

The Boomer is a short book written with few words and meaningful illustrations that had me sitting up and saying WOW! As a child of the 60's and baby boomer who walked on many protest lines throughout the years, the book at times made me sad to think of what happened to many of us as life caught up with us and sadly interfered. In a most clever manner, The Boomer, asks us to evaluate what went right or what went wrong. I did find that at the end there was a general feeling of sadness as to some of the things which may be passing by my generation today but if this was the point of the read, then Mr. Asher has done a fine job. And more important, The Boomer made me sit up and think about the direction of my life.

I did enjoy this book and do recommend it. I also hope that it will not only appeal to the baby boomers among us but also to older and younger people as well.

A good book but you'll feel like sticking your head in an oven after reading it. I found it looking for all the books in my local library in the category "Experimental Fiction." It has a drawing on almost every page to accompany the text. It is the pessimistic story of a boomer's life from birth to death, as the protagonist struggles through life's stages in a fruitless pursuit of happiness. Its kind of cynical and reminds me of the thinking of my father's generation (survivors of the Depression and veterans of World War II). Its a small format with few pages and is a very quick read.