Customer Reviews

The Desperate Season

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Michael Blaine's The Desperate Season would disturb any reader at any time, but in post-Columbine America, its story of a disturbed young man with firearms unsettles even more. The richness of the book, however, lies not only in the story, but in how it is told. In addition to creating the point of view of this disturbed young man (Maurice Coleman), Blaine makes us privy to the first-person views of the half-dozen or so characters made up of family and friends who have touched Maurice's life in one way or another, and who will pay a heavy price.

By alternating these points of view in different time frames via flashbacks, ranging from minutes to years, the book builds an almost unbearable tension within the reader. If conflict is the stuff of drama, then this book has it in spades; the intricate variety of conflicts we witness in the characters is underscored by a conflict created within ourselves as readers! By deftly exploiting these shifts in time and points of view, the author pits two over-riding narrative desires against each other: the reader's desire to know what happened with the reader's desire to know why it happened. The book is something of the literary equivalent of the Cyclone roller coaster. Hang on for a wild ride.

The Desperate Season is at once both timely in its details of character and place, and timeless in its portrayal of a large and colorful palette of human frailty. Although not without humor, this book breaks your heart, as you cry out, "Oh, No!" in response to the inexorable path its characters must take to tragedy.

Neat, clean, beautifully sculpted prose, richly drawn characters revealing their deepest secrets, desires and fears, and a narrative that moves you to a gripping climax, make The Desperate Season that rarest thing: a new novel that will be around for a long time. A classic.

A stellar literary achievement, this first novel is the illumiating account of a schizo-affective young man, Maurice, who is prematurely released from the psych hospital and the events that occur as he decompensates. The story is ingeniously told through the eyes and voices of several characters important in Maurice's life. His mother, her best friend, his sister, father Nathan, and Vince, an attorney who was the boyfriend of Maurice's mother before he was born tell us about Maurice and themselves.

The perspective of their memories and the events as they unfold are startling and revealing. As events become known secrets about family relationships are revealed and more importantly the perceptions of reality through the minds of each character are brought to light. This allows the reader to postulate the dynamics that created Maurice's pathology.

I am going to definitely keep a lookout for Michel Blaine. He has written a superb foundation for a solid writing career.

I loved the way the words of Mr. Blain's nove flowed. I could see, feel, and sense the conflicts of his characters. The subject matter of the book was disturbing to say the least, however, these are desperate times for our teens. And so much of what we see today in our culture is based upon violence. Mr. Blain's novel takes us on a journer through a highly volitile landscape. And the wintry landscape he sets his story in does much to enhance the sheer power of it's rather complex exposition. Truely a great read. Try it.

Perhaps I shouldn't criticize when I didn't finish the book. But this is the ONLY book in my entire life that I couldn't finish. And I always try to see the good in anything I read......I couldn't find it.

It just was ricidulous to me. I thought it was interesting that each chapter was told from a different character's point of view, but it seemed more forced than creative and imaginative.

The characters' responses were WAY to over the top. Every character was over-reacting, MAJORLY over-reacting to the point that I didn't even care. It seemed more like it was thrown in for effect because the circumstances that Michael Blaine created did not allow for the amount of drama that he wanted to have. So he just created extra drama. Drama that I would expect from an emotional junior high school student.

And then for extra measure, Michael Blaine would throw in a little side thought in the character's mind that has nothing to do with what's going on. And if I wanted to read about the psyche of a group of dysfunctional family members, that would be one thing, but I actually wanted something to happen in this story. Again - forced. Forced to the point that it was just irritating.

The thing that really clinched it for me was when the father was desperately driving around upstate NY looking for his son, frantic that he could be dead by hypothermia, or dying of hypothermia. He cannot get the image of his son wandering around in the cold. The last tip that he had told him that his son was in a car with someone else. What happened then? Why is the father jumping to this conclusion? Was it just so that he could overreact? Was it just to, again, give more drama to a scenario that didn't supply enough circumstances to warrant it?

And I flipped ahead to see if the climax at least began soon. Or to see if SOMETHING happened soon. And it seemed by page 180, still nothing had come about.

I gave up.

"Desperate" describes perfectly what the characters are feeling throughout the story. The final act of someone who is mentally ill and has no control over his sickness was scary. I found the bleak, cold landscape the perfect setting to describe the characters and their situation.

This really is a masterpiece. Brilliant prose, compelling characters, a gripping narrative. For whatever reason, the NYTBRrrrr complained about the barn scene, which I thought it was intense. I really liked the fractured narrative, too. It seems ready made for Atom Egoyan: The Sweet Hereafter meets Pulp Fiction. My only quibble is The Blair Witch-style dust jacket. It left me cold as Nathan in that creepy black lake....

The Desperate Season is a haunting and beautifully written novel that will also keep you on the edge of your seat from start to finish. Maurice, a young schizophrenic who goes off his meds, manages to get his hands on a gun with surprising ease. Before long, Maurice is holding his family hostage at gun point and the tension in the novel becomes almost unbearable.

This is a story we have all heard and seen before, in one version or another, on television or in newspapers. What is most surprising about The Desperate Season is not the violence but what goes on behind the newspaper headline. Michael Blaine tells his story through six different voices, steadily developing character. This is not a novel about the explosive event, it goes to the deepest levels of character, showing not only who these people are as individuals but also how their behavior changes in the most subtle ways when they interact with each other.

Blaine is always at the top of his game here: his prose is electric, his tricky structure is tightly controlled, enabling his characters to shine right along with his page turning plot. The Desperate Season is a kock-out, pure entertainment that also manages to touch the soul.

I can't stop thinking about the characters in this book. It is a great read. This is one of those books you will never forget. So - stop reading this review and buy Michael Blaine's new novel. It is a chilling tale which becomes a home movie in your mind. Blaine has the ability to paint a landscape and then fill it with people that you think about even when you are not reading his book. Don't miss this one.

I echo all the complements due Mr. Blaine. If his book was longer by another 100 pages I would say it would be among the best books I've read all year. His choices are interesting, sexy, sad, finely-tuned. At times while reading this book I thought "There's nothing this guy can't write about." Do yourself a favor: Read it.

I find it very amusing how one person from Upstate NY was offended by the sensationalism of this book. The terrain of the book is delineated carefully and authoritatively by someone who has spent much of his time in the region. The ring of truth is everywhere. But if you live up in the rural outback, you're not going to appreciate seeing it depicted as it is--a disorganized, dysfunctional congeries of rootless transients trying to make do with an ugly landscape of muddy roads and convenience stores.

Fiction is most entertaining when it distills hard fact into a pleasant liqueur. Few fiction writers can manage this trick nowadays nowadays, and that's why new nonfiction (books full of facts) consistently outsells fiction (books written by recluses who know very few facts). But sometimes a fictional work opens wide a door to a reality that you want to know more about, and such a book is The Desperate Season. I read it _desperately_ wanting to know more about the rural poor of Upstate New York, strange as that may sound. The mixed-breed "sloughters' in their rusted old cars and inbred habits--who the hell are they? Supposedly there are such people Upstate. I have seen them listed as "slaughters" in an old map of mixed-race peoples in America. I wish Michael Blaine would write a nonfiction follow-up to answer all the questions this book raised!