Customer Reviews

Forgiveness (James a. Michener Fiction Series)

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

 

 

Grimsley's Charley Stranger rants, bitches and moans against his universe and his family with a fresh, real verisimilitude that really clicks over the pages of this slender and very funny novel. I've read my share of chick lit, and at first glance this viciously amusing book would appear to be a male version of the genre. Charley's wife is a woman so evil Dell Comics could use her as a supervillain. Charley himself is a very big kid, dreaming about being in love with the Asian actress in a TV car commercial, eating too much, drowning in vodka, and exchanging nasty insults with his wife at the kitchen table because neither has a job or any intention of getting one. Charley is undersexed, small of penis, his sexuality somewhat indeterminate.

But just when you think you can settle comfortably in Charley's fantasy world and come out with some insights into male humor, Grimsley does what chick lit authors so rarely do. He delivers. He follows the flaws of his human character all the way out to their logical end. What do I know about literature? But Forgiveness felt like a very great book indeed, fresh and new and bitingly funny in its conception and barreling towards a conclusion that left me reeling.

Not only was this book ugly and unoriginal, the myriad lexographical errors were supremely annoying. The narrator wants to take care of something "quietly and discretely" and he also has a "waddle" under his chin. Puzzling inconsistencies in the timeframe are the result, I'm convinced, of laziness and are not intentional. This book feels like it was written over a long weekend. Don't waste your time.

I did not need this book to be like Grimsley's novel _My Drowning_, which I loved. But I did need this book to be good. All of the lyrical imagery and compelling character voice of _My Drowning_ is absent here, and its hole is filled with drab, angry, purposeless characters and plot. Yes, I get the indictment of popular culture going on in _Forgiveness_, but who cares if I can't stand to be in the same room with this narrator and his wife? This novella is by no means literary fiction and by no means good.