22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A train wreck of a novel ... but recommended with qualms, October 21, 2002
This review is from: For Fucks Sake (Paperback)
If you like the narrator's sense of humor and can identify with some of these characters, you'll really enjoy this book.
If you don't, you'll most likely be horrified ... For about 150 pages I thought this was the worst writing I'd ever read. However, there was a consistent voice, albeit one that seemed to make the wrong rhetorical choices every time.
Specifically, he makes judgments about things that he hasn't explained fully, so you're supposed to take his word for a lot of things [and you don't], and he says a lot of things not because they mean anything but because he likes how they sound. This is usually called babbling and children/immature adults do it. His thoughts were also loaded with cliches about Kerouac and Hunter Thompson. There were no characters ... just impulses. I began to anything this relentlessly out of touch with how it would be perceived had to be a big gag.
So I kept reading. And there was a reward for the effort: About half way through, the narrator changes. He goes from being a collection of cliches/desires/impulses to an actual human being. Not a nice person at first, but hey, you can tell he's trying to become a man. The immature jokiness slowed, the cliched descriptions and inflated language eased up ... he became a more straightforward teller of his story and clearly he'd begun to absorb the lessons of his suffering. There were some moments of delicious irony in the later sections and some outstanding sentences. (I thought the ending was a bit of a cop-out -- the narrator was progressing ... he just didn't quite know it yet.)
The book itself turned out not to be a long gag, but a bildingsroman. It is to some extent a necessary novel, too...there are people like this, and this book helps render them understandable.
Also check out Knut Hamsun's Hunger, Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin, Nelson Algren's Somebody in Boots and Charles Jackson's The Lost Weekend for this kind of material handled by masterful writers.
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Extremely Unlikable, October 26, 2002
This review is from: For Fucks Sake (Paperback)
As part of a book club, I have read many books and am always on the look out for intelligent well written stories of fiction. This was not one. I found all the characters extremely unlikable, underdeveloped and higly offensive. The "humor" was sophomoric at best with the added interludes unwelcome and juvenile. I have read better thought out plot lines in the childrens literature I've read to my five year old. I will say it did give our book club quite a lively discussion, as we each took a turn reading the passages we felt most offensive. I will cafefully scrutinize any further recommendations I find on the Amazon site. The back cover states it to be " the Moby Dick of the 21st century". The only correlation is the literal one as the author finds possibly every colorful description of his own.
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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting and Different!, April 4, 2002
This review is from: For Fucks Sake (Paperback)
I picked this book up when I was visiting NYC, intrigued by the title. And despite the "catchy" title, this is a serious work of fiction. The book starts off on a fun note in New Orleans, and Lasner really gets the Mardi-Gras atmosphere right. However, as the book moves into the second and third sections, the main character's despair and longing become the focus of the story, and that is where the novel really shines, describing in intricate and forecful detail one man's descent into a hell of his own making, which he feels powerful to stop, though he is aware of what he is doing at every turn (There is a powerful scene at the end of section 2, when he walks through the streets of Philadelphia, in a state of extreme agitation, waiting for a simple phone call). Lasner has a catchy and hypnotic style of writing, which is alternately funny and intense, often at the same time. A surprising find!
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