Customer Reviews

Everyone's Burning: A Novel

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

 

 

I consider Everyone's Burning by Ian Spiegelman (Villard Books) the best novel that I have read in the last twenty years, since I read Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby or Faulkner's Sanctuary. The author has written a brilliant book which can be read on many different levels. On one hand it is fiction about growing up in a tough Queens neighborhood, gangs, people going to prison, weird sex, drugs, friendship and betrayal and just at this level, Everyone's Burning is an exceptional read, mesmerizing and completely unforgettable. Spiegelman builds his characters in such a way that you really care about them, they become so vivid that is a moment of despair when you reach the final page and realize that you aren't going to be able to live inside their skins any more. But there is so much more to Everyone's Burning. Spiegelman is a genius. This man can really write. The text is alive, the words just jump off the page and crunch you. This author will be heard from again, many times again. His style is brief and dead on target. Even though he is writing about a very tough scene, the literary style here is so superb and the word choice is so skilled Spiegelman could be just as well be writing poetry. This is writing craft at its most perfect. For instance, there is a key scene where the main character accuses a cop whom he feels has not tried hard enough in tracking down the guy who sexually molested him as a kid. Spiegelman focuses on the shifting physical distance between the main character and the cop as the main character describes the scene. It is one of the most effective brief descriptions of two sort-of-strangers confronting each other intensely that I have ever read, and the author pulled it off by focusing on that changing distance between them, because in that kind of defensive overwhelming situation people will get caught up with displacement and remember small details like physical distance. I finished reading that passage thinking, "Can literature possibly be better than this?" But it was like that virtually on every page with Everyone's Burning. Another small stylistic example: the author ended his brief chapters at exactly the right moment. Some of the chapters were just a few pages and their length was always unpredictable, giving the book a pacing element that Spiegelman used like a master. The author's use of rhythm in his text, his feel for language was remarkable. The author always kept me a little off balance but the joy of reading such powerful prose and ruthlessly effective character development just made me desperate for more when I got to the last page. I cannot recommend a book more highly than this one.

Spiegelman brilliantly exposes the proverbial elephant on the coffee table of middle class America. Completely exposed, this writer's first novel is daring, disturbing and never slow. Once in awhile you need to take off your clothes and look at your self in the mirror.

I heard about this book when Ian Spiegelman was on Howard Stern. So I bought it and read it in one day. Well-written, psychologically meaty, and the ending will tear out your heart. Hands down, best last line ever.

Perfectly captures the alienation and hopelessness felt by those who, as children, are failed by the adults around them. While there are some funny parts that will make you laugh, the story's true strength lies in the very real depiction of characters who can only cope with an unkind world and each other through completely self-destructive behavior. If you are shocked or bored by this book, I can only wonder what planet you've been living on. Open your eyes.

OK, I'll admit that it was the cover that caught my eye, but when I picked the book up and read the first paragraph, I laughed and knew it was for me. It's an incredibly fast and furious read, full of humor and energy and everything you want in a new writer. While some of the scenes are a little intense, I never once thought the writer was posing or doing something for effect that wasn't real. It feels like a postcard from the front lines, except the front lines are in Queens, and all we can do to keep the empitness of the world at bay is try to find some way to connect with the lost souls around us.

A realistic portrail of middle class Queens youth, this book hits the nail on the head. Speigelman did a great job for his first book. Worth the read!

After seeing an ad for the book online, I decided to give this young contemporary author a do-or-die shot. My preconception was that I would find the book to be amateurish or at best, mildly amusing. I merely intended to broaden my exposure and was not looking for some masterpiece. However, from page one, the book floored me. It was unlike anything I had ever read. The author paints a blurry picture; one cannot see the characters clearly. It is as though everything is in a daze. Nobody 'seems' to have a clear-cut well-define personality. I could not identify with anyone. And that was the best part. Against the backdrop of smoke-filled cocaine-infested barrooms with young adults, the ones who are supposed to lead the world tomorrow, is the lead character Koch, struggling to get on with his life, a life with no apparent meaning or ambition.

Like a fog that is opaque from a distance, but translucent upon closer inspection, this book makes sense if one tries to be in Koch's shoes and imagines living life the way him and his circle of associates do. The book depicts the lives of adults who did not have a childhood; those stuck in perpetual confusion and incorrect decisions; those easily seduced by the simplest vices. As long as I tried to judge and analyze the characters and their actions as an outsider, I had trouble imagining anyone living as irresponsible, vicious, and wasteful existence as them. But after a couple of chapters, Koch grows on you. Despite Koch's blunt negligent attitude and utter disrespect for all forms of authority and power, the author manages to induce warmth for the innocent child still in his heart.

Just like there is no beginning or an end to a fog, there is no need for a chronological storyline in this book. It is just an episode in the lives of these lost youngsters and the real story is the atmosphere - the smoky environment and Koch's black spots. Definitely one of the best books I have read.

As a Queens native, who grew up just a few miles from Bayside, I can sum up Spiegelman's novel in one word: accurate. His prose style is straight forward; his characters are brilliantly pathetic. Life isn't always pretty and Spiegelman won't let you forget that.

I initially bought "Everyone's Burning" based upon my love of all things Queens and was very pleasantly surprised.
"Everyone's Burning" is not for the Oprah's Book Club bunch. It's not sweet, the characters are irredeemable, and the setting is bleak. I LOVED it. It's such a well-crafted book. The sentences are razor sharp and the dialogue is crisp. There's not one wasted or superfluous word.
I found the themes and structure very Raymond Carver-esque in their realism and deceptive simplicity. The characters experience love, friendship and loss with varying degrees of confusion, anger and denial. Put away the rose-colored glasses, "Everyone's Burning" does not paint a pretty little picture of society.
This is a terrific debut novel. I look forward to seeing more from this bright young novelist.

Personally, I find it hard to believe that anyone found this novel dull, and I loved the novel as a whole after having read only an excerpt on nerve.com - I read it in a single afternoon, ignoring chores I should have been doing. It is a slender book, but not a word seems in excess or wasted. Spiegelman is a writer whose understanding of language and words comes through to the reader without him having to show off. More than that though, this is a novel that has been written by someone who understands what a story is - it is refreshing to read a first novel from a young male writer that doesn't come off as a whiney memoir barely passing as fiction. The sex and drugs are just part of the world that the characters inhabit, not shock tactics. And the characters of that world are so vivid, that as a New Yorker walking around the same city I think sometimes that I might catch sight of a Carey or an Ortiz on the subway.