Customer Reviews

Famous Builder

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The most subversive thing that Famous Builder does is to retell family history from a queer perspective. Thus, the young narrators painstaking journey toward an adult queer life is implicitly compared and connected to the fathers movement up the social ladder. From Paul Lisickys point of view, both are quintessentially American acts. How refreshing to read a book in which gay identity is not THE subject of the story but one of its narratives. Every reader will find an aspect of her story mirrored here, regardless of her background. Ive come back to it again and again, always with something new to ponder.

Sweet. Irreverent. Warm. A little crazed. And still these adjectives don't do justice to the accomplishment of this lovely book.

What a wonderful sociological study! Both hilarious and tragic. It brings out the dysfunctional family that exists in all of us. I'd recommend this book to anyone.

Every now and then I come across a book that takes hold of all my free time, that practically nothing gets accomplished until I reach the last page. This was one such book! The author has accomplished to portrait his journey from middle America youth to adulthood with great observation, introspection, and delirious humor. I loved it!

Every now and then I come across a book that occupies all my free time. This is one such book! The author has accomplished to portrait his journey from middle America childhood to adulthood with great observation, introspection, and delirious humor. I loved it!

Paul Lisicky expects a lot of his readers. He goes after his themes in subtle, crafty ways. Famous Builder doesn't wear its intellect on its sleeves as does the cool-boy, smarter-than-thou postmodernism of Franzen, Moody, Marcus, and Wallace, though its social vision is no less substantial, in spite of its frequently comic voice. Here is an America in which the promise of self-creation co-exists with the bewildering temptation to do yourself in. It's about what it's like to succeed in all the culturally approved ways and feel like an imposter at the same time. Famous Builder couldn't take place anywhere but in the U.S., a culture where the lines of status and class are constantly being revised, where no one is sure of who or what they are, and the newly minted live with the anxiety of losing it all. Of being "found out." Of ending up right back where they started. Or, worse, with less. "Who are you," asks the narrator, "if you've recreated yourself?" I haven't read such a deft book in ages. Somehow Paul Lisicky manages to dramatize these ideas with stunningly precise language, sympathetic characters, emotional depth, and an unrelenting drive toward clarity and generosity. This is a major leap after Lawnboy. I'm certain that Paul Lisicky is well on his way toward an exceptional future as a writer.

Lisicky's Famous Builder is one book that can be judged by its cover which is beautiful, precise, subtle,and nuanced. Hemingway noted that "writing is architecture, not interior decoration," and in this startling collection of essays and memoirettes that trace Lisicky's emotional development while they simultaneously recreate, re-invent and reevaluate the South Jersey towns he loved and moved away from, Lisicky builds a lasting work of art. Sentence for sentence there is nothing frivolous or expendable in Famous Builder. Its emotional range is astonishing. A must read for anyone who has looked closely (or longs to look closely) at the worlds around and inside him. One of the more cohesive, unusual and engaging collections of essays to come along in recent years. It deserves serious attention. Lisicky is a fresh and innovative architect of the form.

A wonderful sociological study. Both hilarious and tragic. It pokes fun at every dysfunctional family that exists in all of us. I can't recommend this book enough.

The hallmark of this surprising, engaging memoir is tenderness; Lisicky writes about his past, and those who people his memory, with such affection, humor and attention that the reader can't help but share his regard. This is about as far from familiar, linear memoir as you can get -- FAMOUS BUILDER unfolds in short, essay-like chapters, each built around a thematic center. Thus the book spirals in time, moving through the speaker's life in unexpected ways, though the parts are all linked by Lisicky's fascination with building a self, remaking the old, designing a world. Funny, emotionally alive, and full of beautiful sentences, this book is not to be missed.

No one can read Famous Builder without falling in love with its boy narrator and the writer he grows up to be. With an always feverish brain, the child narrator sees his mundane suburb as something intense and wonderful, awful and strange, always more than the world his family and neighbors dwell in. He is always on the verge of exploding -- or imploding, perhaps -- with his own creative energy, and heightened sensitivity to the energies arising all around him.
He builds models of housing developments, naming each street and tract, dreaming of becoming a "famous builder." As an adolescent, he writes and performs liturgical music, while grappling with the incongruities of his emerging sexual identity and the Church's creed. This narrator seems both lightning rod and lightning. He is lithe and sensuous, gawky and prone to embarrassment. This is a boy whose "heart is beating so hard that he wants to rip it out of [his] chest," who "sees everything in the dark: the oil stain rainbowing the driveways; the bronzing pachysandra, the dewberry."
The adult Paul finds writing, but his creativity is still marked by the tension between shame of his distinctive, attuned self, and the drive for reckless self-exposure. The world, for Lisicky, "overflows with wildness, danger, and beauty." So does this book. Its grabs its readers and pleads: See more, feel more: more light, more life, more beauty.