Customer Reviews

Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale

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

 

 

It took a while to finish this one but I'm glad I did. The novel focuses on the perilously decadent lives of Ralph and Alice Anne. Crafted in the dialectical tradition of the "Honeymooners" television show of old, this contemporary story extracts the dark, vile, highly addictive nature of its characters and their friends. Ralph and Jim are best friends, college professors and writers, whose lives spirals from one disaster to the next as they move through life with no rules no boundaries and a very limited future. Kinder has written a story of drug induced drunken debauchery that is both comical and loathsome at once. His writing is well paced and clear. "Honeymooners" is an overall enjoyable read that highlights the irreverent imagination (or actual life) of a talented author. This is my first read by Kinder and I'm not disappointed.

This is not the sort of book I usually read. The author is male. The setting and time are ones that don't generally interest me. The characters (in their real lives) were obviously larger than life. So what else was there to say? In a word -- PLENTY. This book surprised me again and again. The women, drawn as bold and savvy as can be written. The setting and time intrinsic to the story, but not dated, for I was there -- right there -- as I followed this story along. And sure, the real life people from whom the characters were based were larger than life by the time I heard about them, but this book gave me a chance to meet and feel for them in a way I never could, reading about then in non-fiction. Gave me a chance to know them in a way. To suffer, to triumph, to cheer, to take comfort.

This book is simply hilarious. If you enjoyed the film "Flirting with Disaster," you'll have a good appreciation for this wonderful, touching, earthy novel. See the plot descriptions above for what happens in the book, but read it to enjoy the numerous moments of surprising lyricism, astonishing humor, and enough literary pot-smoking and alcohol consumption to put you into rehab. Too funny? Thankfully yes.

Chuck Kinder turns the third law of thermodynamics, as applied to literature - the relationship between a writer's seriousness and the amount of humor in his/her novel is inversely proportional - squarely on its head. This is a serious piece of literature that is laugh out loud, pee your pants funny. Nicely done, Mr. Kinder.

A raunchy, raucous romp by America's King of Rockabilly writers. It's about the desperate sweetness of artistic attempt and letting the dark angel out, something seemingly necessary in certain neighborhoods of life. Contains a lot of Chuck's trademark bluesy lyrical notes and some of the funniest writing I've ever read anywhere by anybody. The scene where our two heroes are held captive in their car by a dog is by itself well worth the price of a hardback or two. So, Good Golly Miss Molly, Great Balls of Fire, there's a Whole Lot of Shakin' Goin' On. Take a chance on this book. It's a rare treat.

Chuck Kinder's Honeymooners is an amusing tale of two writers whose lives strip away the "glamour" of the hard drinking writer a la Ernest Hemingway. Ralph and Jim are likeable losers, involved with and married to, women who barely manage to put up with them. The novel is rather unconventional and the narrative moves forward on its own pace, providing amusement all the way. If you enjoy a humorours novel that is a little different, give this one a try. Enjoy.

Like many readers, I was amazed and delighted to see that Chuck Kinder was at last publishing another novel. His second, "The Silver Ghost," has been one of my favorites since I first discovered it in (alas) the close-out bin of a B. Dalton in the early 1980s; I have read it several times and given it to friends. Only recently did I learn about Kinder's supposed connection to the main character of the novel and film "Wonder Boys," but it is a connection very easy to see upon reading "Honeymooners." The new novel is clearly a roman a clef, with Kinder himself as Jim Stark (also the main character of "The Silver Ghost," though somewhat altered here) and famed short-story writer Raymond Carver as Ralph Crawford. Other well-known artists make cameo appearances, sometimes under their own names (as with James Crumley), other times slightly disguised (as with R. Crumb). The action is fast and delirious, set piece after set piece of drunken outrageousness set largely in the Bay Area in the 1970s. Many of the scenes are quite funny in and of themselves, yet I felt a weariness setting in as episode followed episode without any particular narrative drive to propel the story forward. The characters are quite remarkably unsympathetic, holding interest only as a traffic accident does: for the sheer gruesome fascination of it all. Too, the book suffers from the same fault almost every novel about writers always suffers from: it is never entirely believable that the characters *are* writers. We never see any of their writing; they never spend any time writing; we never see them thinking about writing. Their supposed literary products just seem to arrive as if by magic, as with Crawford's debut collection of short stories--the reader can't help but wonder, When did he write these stories, and how? It's Kinder's job to tell us, but he fails in this task.

The novel is very episodic, with chapters thrown in with no connection to the main story and seemingly there simply because they are amusing to the author. It's difficult not to suspect the heavy hand of an editor here: legend has it that this manuscript was thousands of pages long at one point, yet the published version is quite conventional in length (a little over 350 pages). Perhaps the longer version was more cohesive. As it stands, this is a fun-to-read mess of a book, hardly in the class of "The Silver Ghost" or "Snakehunter" (Kinder's coming-of-age first novel), but amusing enough in its slight way. If Kinder had taken six months to write it, it would be quite an acceptable bit of fluff. At 25 years, it must be admitted that it is a serious disappointment...but then again, what book *wouldn't* be, after a quarter-century's build-up?

Ralph is married to Alice Ann and plays on the side. Jim was first married to Judy and divorced because of his impotence. He is now married to Lindsay and plays around. Alice Ann plays around. Lindsay used to play around an awful lot before marriage. All these characters do, is drink. About once on every one of the 358 pages of this book. And, of course, they smoke pot every day. The main action plays seventeen years after all of them first got married. By now they should all be dead of various failures of internal organs.

All this action is repetitive throughout the book. Furthermore, the characters change in mid stream. Lindsay, she of the one night stands, all of a sudden is the faithful wife. The book is billed as "wildly comic". That it certainly is not - unless you think it is fun to watch four people destroy themselves.

"Honeymooners" purports to be a novel about the 1970s: it depicts two hard-driving art students, Ernie Ball and Maxime Henry, as they try to out-do each other in the sex-n-drugs department. Well, that's a loser's game for them both. Sometimes this book, which reportedly was fashioned out of newspaper clippings that yellowed with age and neglect in first-time author Kinder's basement for over twenty-five years, strikes an especially responsive chord, as when Ball and Henry head out onto the famed Palo Alto Boulevard for some of the Bay Area region's famed Elderberry Wine and end up having a confab with Anne Waldman, Wendell Berry, and Floyd Salas (three "real life" writers with rich Bay Area histories). But maybe it's just me and my indomitable affection for San Francisco, the MFA program at Stanford under good old Wally Stegner, and my sense that things were as good as they've ever been then. Maybe it's just my time as an architectural intern at the Speer Office Building during the Nixon administration. But I can't reconcile this dark, and somewhat irresponsible, vision of the seventies with my own memories of those joyous times. We were helping to save the world from so many menaces, from Moscow to Mozambique, and here were a bunch of irresponsible "artists" sitting on the avenues of Palo Alto--making fun of us. It was hard to take then and now. Chuck Kinder shows some glimmerings of talent. And my wife's voice shook with emotion as she read this book to me--for I am now, yes, a BLIND architect! Robbed of my passion and my profession, I sit in darkness and am read to, by my dear forbearing wife. Her voice shook with emotion--with miscellaneously endowed chuckles, with brief chortles from deep in her esophagus, with rude exclamations using the lips. I sat in my darkness and listened as the story unfolded. In the end we quarreled, and before she issued her customary scream and fell into her customary faint, she suggested that I was an old fogey who could never understand such things. Perhaps she's right. Perhaps in that respect, too, I am blind. But I urge you to try "Honeymooners."

There's no plot to this book, which would be fine if the book was populated with interesting characters. It isn't. The characters aren't likable or interesting. Getting through this book was a challenge and became purely a mechanical exercise.

I'm irritated that I could have read several good books in the time it took me to wade through this one.