Customer Reviews

Gob's Grief: A Novel

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

 

 

Chris Adrian is a gifted, highly imaginative writer who takes the theme of grief and builds upon it by blending historical fact and actual people with a cast of intriguing, sometimes fascinating, characters. The Civil War details make for compelling reading and the first half of the book carries the reader along at a steady gallop. The second half, which delves into the backgrounds of many of the characters, is far slower in pacing and requires a committed interest on the part of the reader. The feel for time and place is wonderfully effective; the pervasive grief (of all the central characters) is almost overwhelming. But I found it tough going to get through to the end. This is a heavy book, on a heavy theme: the notion that the loss of beloved brothers could drive people to create a machine that would reverse the process and bring all the dead back to life.

Some of the characters in Gob's Grief are extraordinarily compelling creations, particularly the Urfeist, and Pickie Beecher. I recommend this book with the caveat that it is not for the faint of heart or those unwilling to suspend disbelief. Certainly, I'll be very interested to see what Chris Adrian does next. For a first novel, this is an impressive debut.

A boy, Tomo, runs off to battle during the Civil War, leaving his hesitant twin brother Gob behind, and is almost instantly killed. A few years later we meet Gob once again, now a doctor driven by guilt and loss to construct a fantastic machine that will bring Tomo (and all the thousands of Civil War dead) back to life. Others are driven to join Gob's quest--the poet Walt Whitman, who hears the voice of a dead soldier in his head; Dr. Will Fie, literally followed by ghosts through the streets, and beautiful Maci Trufant, who flees her father's madness only to find her own left hand becoming the instrument for her dead brother's frantic communications, scribbled from somewhere beyond the grave.

GOB'S GRIEF is a strikingly emotional and original novel, set in a time when Americans were seemingly drowning in anguish, desperately trying to make sense of a country that had turned on itself. Elements of romance, history, horror, spiritualism and magic realism are ambitiously combined, with mixed results--sometimes the book feels repetitious and overstuffed, and some elements simply never quite manage to fit. However, as a whole, this is a memorable debut novel from a talented writer. I'll be looking for his name again.

The nod to Best Book of the Year has certainly peaked early with the release of Chris Adrian's "Gob's Grief". Far too few contemporary tomes manage to balance the World of Ideas a la Saul Bellow and gripping drama as beautifully as Adrian does. His prose is consistantly poetic, inspired and enchanting, transporting the reader into Civil War-torn America with complete ease. "Gob's Grief" soars, transforms and, ultimately, helps heal the mortal wounds that are part of being all too human. Stunning.

this is one of the most imaginative and beautifully written books I have ever read. The opening chapters dealing with the death of Tomo are some of the most heartbreaking and disturbing words ever written about War.

The tale of Gob, Macie, Dr. Fie, Pickie, and Walt Whitman is very engrossing. The obsession with conquering death permeates every chapter. The feelings of grief and despair are palpable.

The ending, while it may leave some disappointed, was handled very well. With a tale of this scope and subject I was very leary of how the ending would be done, but I was not disappointed.

I eagerly await the next effort by Mr. Adrian!

Gob's Grief is beautiful, sensitive, insightful, moving, repetitive, convoluted, a little too "artful," and (as one reviewer said) "wonderous strange." If you like this kind of thing, you'll give this book five stars. If you want a story that makes sense, or has realistic (and sane) characters and a reasonable progression from beginning to end, you'll have a hard time getting through it. I am in the latter group.

The Civil War was emotionally traumatic on a national scale; much has been said about the battles themselves. But what about the survivors of the war? How do they piece their lives together again after everything they've taken for granted has been destroyed?

Walt Whitman ministered to the wounded in a Washington hospital. In the short story "Every Night for a Thousand Years," Chris Adrian describes Whitman's experiences: it is a heart-breaking and exquisitely crafted story, which appears as a chapter in this novel.

The novel allows Adrian to flesh out the characters, introduce new ones, and blend fictional with historical events. It's fascinating--and disturbing--to read about post-Civil War New York. Adrian brings the era to life, and he has an original perspective. There is a Gothic intensity to the whole book. And, he has the ability to allow the reader to feel sadness and loss. For those reasons, it's worth reading.

On the other hand, the story/chapter "Every Night..." was much better, alone, than as part of the book. Also, there were so many characters, and some had more substance than others. I found the pace of the book a little jarring. Maybe that was Adrian's intent, to give the reader some sense of what it must have been like in the late 19th Century, letting go of the expectations you've built and having to construct new ones.

I hope Adrian continues to write. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants a good solid read, but I would definitely steer a depressed person in another direction.

This novel amazed me for the way it tells of the myriad affections there are between people, most of them unable to be sanctified by marriage, and many of them familiar from experience, and not for having been described in prose. The novel does so in a landscape that reminded me of Jules Verne, or of Shakespeare's The Tempest, and Adrian is in a way a sort of Ariel, the shapeshifting magician's attendant spirit, than like any other writer he is compared to (for I do think him unique)--- taking on shapes we know (Whitman, Woodhull) and that, in taking them on, he owns and then reintroduces to us. Reading of his Whitman you feel that it is Whitman better than a biography might display, and yet you know, another spirit is present, also---the counterfeit of good magic. All of this is done to tell his story, of men who have all lost brothers, of the flesh or spirit or both, and have set themselves against Heaven, God, and the angels to get them back. In the way that it is the story of the glorious machine these men build, it is like Verne, actually, but in the manner of a brother, perhaps, borne of a different father. Don't mistake this for some dreary historical fiction that seeks impossibly to be an historically accurate tale of the past returned complete---to truly write such a thing (and many critics would have us believe we need to try to do so), a writer would need the machine these men are trying to build. It's better than that, though, the novel slips off the realism that has afflicted the intentions of so many too-earnest American writers, and tells us something real about how people feel, and what that can make them do, and build. In a way one has the sense that for the writer, the novel is very like the impossible machine Gob and Will build: composed of other people's bones and the representations of their deaths, filled with the brightest light, magnificent for what it cannot do and for what it does, both.

This novel is indeed wondrous strange. Rooted in history, peopled by historical characters, resplendent with magical realism; this is a journey through times, attitudes, and obsessions that end fantistically but believably. Mr. Adrian's sure touch took me into a spiritualist reality that jostled but somehow never upset the grounding of army camps, battlefields, and the streets, hospitals, and drawing rooms of Civil War era America. Family, memory, grief, blood, and the inventiveness of humanity are the bedrock of this story; and anyone who has pondered the ultimate mystery of death will find something here. Mr. Adrian's action proceeds from character, and that is the solid ground of this novel. Of course the action would unfold in just this way, the characters demand it. I highly recommend "Gob's Grief," you will finish it as if waking from a dream - all wondrous and strange.

As I said in the title to this review, this is a very strange book, indeed. It takes historical figures such as Victoria Woodhull, Walt Whitman and others, and mixes them with fictional characters to create a plot that is extremely difficult to describe. Suffice it to say that one of the characters is intent upon building a "machine" that will bring back all of the dead. It sounds like pure science fiction, but the story is so well told that, even if you're not an SF fan, you won't be put off by reading it. There are large chunks of beautiful writing in this book, and some of the insights into the human condition are amazing for a young author. You just have to get beyond the odd basis of the book, and read and enjoy it for the writing and the character development. It's a worthwhile effort, believe me.

This is the work of a brilliant, mature writer -- I was completely overwhelmed by this book and continue to be amazed that it is Dr. Adrian's first. Not since Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping have I been so impressed by a first novel. In a work anchored in a profound understanding of the call of grief on our lives, I found this novel's most endearing quality to be its humor. This is the humor of Crime and Punishment or the second half of Moby Dick: the sly, insightful burrowing into the heart of what it is to be a possessor of free will in a universe that seems sometimes not to recognize the agency. I'm eagerly awaiting the next work of this promising new author.