Customer Reviews

The Handyman: A Novel (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

5 star:		(38)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(22)

 

 

It took awhile for this book to make an impact, but what an impact it makes! The reader is a bit thrown off by the opening pages which contain a grant proposal to study the life of the most famous artist of the generation. Once the story is begun, it is so captivating that it's easy to forget the opening and get lost. The plot follows a young aspiring artist who can't seem to find his metier. He goes to Paris but just can't seem to fit in and instead returns to L.A. to try to make his mark. Rather than pursue art, he ends up rooming with an odd cast of characters (one of whom never bathes) and making money as a handyman. Though he's not particularly handy in terms of fixing things, he has a therapeutic effect on everyone he comes across. In short, he ends up fixing egos and lost souls rather than doing a bang up job with the laundry machine. See is such a fantastic writer that everything works -- the prose carries us from one oddball family to another. The beauty of the book is that once you reach the end, you could spend an hour re-reading the first two pages and saying "Ah HAH -- now I get it." The characters are so eccentric and interesting and the main character so compelling that it's hard not to be taken in by this thoroughly charming and well-crafted book.

I just finished this book. Like others here, I kept wanting to save some for later, so I wouldn't eat the whole thing at once. I finally had to stay up till 2 am one weeknight to finish it. So I came here to see what others thought. I was surprised at the negative reviews! So I thought about them, and OK, I agree about the slightly silly way women were portrayed (I've never known anyone who got laid as much as Robert Hampton!). I agree that a lot of the characters were stereotypes (Austen, Hank, June, Mr. Landry). But all that being said, I still adored the book. I think the abbreviated sentences and other literary devices were made to portray Hampton as the person he was...an unlikely hero, a goofy and basically goal-less young man in LA in 1996. Life just *happened* to him, and he's as flabbergasted as any of us about how it all turned out. And the stuck-up grant requests made me howl with laughter after I re-read them on finishing the book. The whole thing is a joke, folks! All these scholarly types running around trying to annotate the life of this "great" artist, when all along he was just a regular schlub like you and me. How could anyone not like this entertaining, rollicking, silly book filled with colors and laughter? I adored it, but I seem to be in the minority here. Go figure.

I fear many of my fellow readers haven't the first clue as to what they're talking about. I am shocked to see criticism of this book. Carolyn See is hardly amateurish. She has not yet written a bad novel, and she is well-loved and respected by Los Angeles Book Review readers and many former students.

Her deceptively simple stylings create a minimalistic and realistic narrative that imbues her writings with a sense of character and place that lesser authors (hiding behind big words and complex sentences) would kill for. To dismiss her work because it isn't complex enough is to miss the entire spirit of her work.

But, then, nothing's for everyone!

I'm not quite sure what drew me to this book, not only examine it in the bookstore, but to then buy it and then quickly consume it in the course of a few days.I know that I found it lyrically simple and compelling. It is a storyof holiness cloaked in ordinary deeds and unconscious acts of kindness.

Carolyn See has created a character In Robert Hampton who while seeming to be a down and out painter, has a remarkable ability in his role of handyman to bring a a completely unconscious and remarkably simple selflessness that has a kind of curative effect on the many unhappy people he encounters in the course of his odd-job life.

While he himself doesn't have much self esteem and doesn't see himself as doing anything remarkably well, his ability to lift people out of their own wreckage toward a kind of path of salvation is his captivating gift -- perhaps it is his 'artistry'.

There is an element of the Jesus story retold in See's work. Her futuristic grant proposal prepared after her character's odd job life portrays him as a critically acclaimed 'artist' who went unrecognized in the latter years of the twentieth century. There is a "testament" quality to the proposal -- much as we read the seeminly unremarkable things which Christ did while he walked on earth in human form in the New Testament. For this reader, See's work brings me to ask myself whether I would know Christ if he entered my life today in some gentle and seemingly unimportant way. I'm not sure these parallels were intended by the author, yet, clearly, this is an inspirational and mystical story.

There is another piece of inspiration in this story for me personally. We don't have to do great things to make a difference in this world; instead, he need to realize the potential greatness of small acts of kindness, charity and an ability to transcend our own often myopic worlds.

However I brought this book home, I'm really glad I did. It continues to resonate through my mind after a few weeks since I've read it! There is something truly special in See's 'failed artist.'

A great read!

Carolyn See's The Handyman is the kind of book you never want to end. You read a little here, a little there, forcing yourself to put it down so that you can save some for later. It's suspensful, funny, sad, uplifting, and even magical. This book made my heart grow bigger, and changed the way I look at my life.Every woman should have a handyman like Bob, the main character. He's a super hero for the neglected, abused, ignored, and taken-for-granted wives and mothers who can't see beyond the heaps of dirty laundry to find themselves. He's also a young artist in search of inspiration. You'd think he'd find it when he goes to Paris, but he doesn't. Oddly enough, he finds in Los Angeles. He finds it in the aromatic loins of an older woman, in the sadness of a lonely trophy wife, and in the day to day satisfaction of being able to help people who need him. Bob is on his way to becoming something, and we are witnesses. What an original idea Carolyn See has come up with here. Imagine the road to glory as an artist not being an ego trip. The book says lots of great things about the creative process while never sounding pretentious or preachy, but what I loved most about it was that it seemed to speak to me personally, to the single mother who lives in Los Angeles and doesn't have a man around to take out the garbage let alone dance with on a Saturday night. Mostly, though, it reminded me how important human kindness is, and how the artist must be compassionate, and without judgment. It's a book about getting a life. You can't wait around for life to happen to you. You must go after what it is you love.

The only reason this book gets a mere 3 1/2 stars rather than 4 1/2-5 stars, is because amidst nearly every other reader's positive reviews for this book, there is one petty-minded reader, who has repeatedly written one damning, nasty, vitriolic review after another on this site. Each time, he or she writes under Anonyomous, starting in April '99 in LA. (It's perhaps no coincidence that it starts in LA, as this is where Carolyn See lives. He or she obviously has some profoundly vindictive personal grudge towards Ms. See). Then every few days, the same person writes another vindictive scathing review, in suspiciously similar language, this time being Anonymous from another part of LA, until as the weeks go by, he or she (and I'm figuring it's a he), realizes he'd better change the place where he lives to some other town, so as not to arouse suspicion.

Since Ms. See, a very sweet lady, teaches at UCLA, it makes me wonder whether the perpetrator of such meanness is a former student of hers to whom she gave bad marks for one of his essays. And judging by the quality of his critiques, she would seem to have been justified. Please, Mr. See-Hater, whomever you are, go foist your petty destructive words on someone genuinely worthy of such vitriol...like George W. Bush.

The book begins with a grant proposal, written in 2027, to study the life and work of the famous painter Robert Hampton. The story that follows is how Bob, the painter wannabe, overcomes a serious case of artist's block to become that painter.

I mistakenly expected an Anne Tyler-like story about a quirky, charming misfit. Bob Hampton is none of these. He's a pragmatist. When he goes to Paris to study art and finds he has artist's block, rather than blow all his savings he returns home to Los Angeles. Faced with the requirement of presenting a portfolio in order to enroll in art school, he turns his creative paralysis into action and hangs out his shingle as a "handyman." I was reminded of the James Taylor song "Handyman"--"I cure broken hearts"-- Bob Hampton cures lives and relationships that are out of kilter. As he does so he also cleans houses, does the laundry, and paints a remarkable poolside mural.

As Bob writes, "I was beginning to get the idea tha maybe you couldn't change the world but you could paint sadness over, brighten the whole thing up. And maybe the bright stuff would bleed down into the interior and start changing it."

There's a lot to this book -- it deserves a wide readership.

If there were a monitor at Amazon to look over these reveiws he/she would discover that all the invective that has been thrown at See's novel on these web pages is the work of one person. Every one star review has the same tone, the same vocabulary, the same "message." Only someone who loathes humankind could loathe this book so much. I also note that every single one star review is anonymous. Of course. Only cowards can hate so much. I can't find anything in the pages of The Handyman that would spark such a tirade - other than that here is a novel that finally features characters interacting with each other on the most basic of levels, with concern and compassion, on a level that REAL people seem to have forgotten. I am enjoying this book and the Samaritan acts of Bob are far from treacly. Maybe for the pessimists and the misanthropes this book is an easy target for the pseudo-intellectual pans and ersatz hip review-speak that hatemongers love to dispense. But for the rest of the world - people who understand that to be alive is to care about fellow human beings - here is a book that is a primer for living as we approach a new century. Believe me, as the year 2000 approaches the world needs more handymen and painters like Bob Hampton.

The time is summer 1996, and the place is Los Angeles. The situation is simple: a young man, Bob Hampton, is lost. Beyond his wish to be a painter, he's keenly aware that he has no direction for either life or career and some doubt that he'll ever find one. Telling himself that he's raising some cash for art school, he hires himself out as a handyman. The clients who enlist his services are people whose lives are a mess. They are even more lost than Bob. And it turns out that he's much better at bringing order and self-sufficiency to their lives than to his own.

Carolyn See has a comic vision and a compassion for her characters that is hard to resist. She sends Bob careening from one dysfunctional household to another, fixing things that don't work, painting, gardening, running errands. And in the process, he has his own journey of self-discovery. Unexpectedly, Bob's jobs call for heroics and the patience of a saint. He saves a toddler from drowning, rescues an abandoned wife who can't drive a car or write a check, helps a widow discard her dead husband's belongings and discover a new life, and comes to the aid of two copeless young men, one of them in failing health.

In addition to his clients, the cast of characters includes his young housemates, whose transient lives converge improbably under the same roof. There is also his forlorn mother, staring blankly from her apartment window into the street below. The novel captures the bruising heat of summer in LA and the peculiar impermanence of a city where people's attachments are temporary, and creative inspiration can materialize in visions hovering over the traffic on Santa Monica Boulevard or across the concrete surrounding a backyard swimming pool.

Finally, The Handyman is a feel-good novel that encourages a kinder, gentler view of the City of Angels and the people who - even temporarily - call it home.

This is a just plain wonderful book. The writer is a true artist. Each sentence, paragraph,and chapter is carefully crafted. The characters, so deceptively simply, become real people about whom one cares profoundly. Above all, this book is an antidote to the cynicism that seems rife it out times. It expresses a mature optimism. As we know from her autobiography Dreaming, this writer knows that bad things happen in this imperfect word; but she sees hope and the good in the world as well. I am quite surprised by the slashing adjectives some of my fellow reviews have used to describe this book. Perhaps the lesson is, if you believe it is OK to bash a serious literary effort--this book is not for you. It somes from a very humane place, where everyone (even those you do not agree with) has a right to civil consideration on their own terms.