Customer Reviews

Indecision

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(16)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(14)

 

 

I have to say, as I often say, that I agree with many of the reviews that have been posted here. I approached this book with great anticipation -- very good reviews, potentially interesting story line but, aas it turned out, I was really disappointed and borderline annoyed that this book had received the hype that it did. I was about 2/3 's of the way through and struggling to finish it and mentioned it to a friend of mine who is a published author, whose opinions I respect ,and asked him about this book and he said "he just gave up" about 1/2 way through --however, I did persist and with some judicious scanning did finish it. I did, however, like the beginning, thought it was funny and clever and really enjoyed Kunkel's capturing of some of the "voices" in a very humourouis way, (e.g. his father and mother) but once he goes off to Ecuador the book really sinks and goes absolutely nowhere as far as I am concerned. But, as they say, you don't know what something tastes like unless you try it ...and this one just didn't do it for me.

I was struck by how wildly the reactions to this book vary. The women seemed to like it more than the men. I don't regret reading it but could not recommend it to others. I used to live in Quito and so had my interest piqued by the setting. I think I might have been less pleased by the book without this association.

On occasions Kunkel is funny, on others he is off the mark and needed to be taken to task by an editor. I imagine that a writer may have an approach where he gets "stuff" on the page that needs to be ferociously edited and honed, either by the writer alone or in conjunction with an editor. This didn't happen with Indecision.

There are some genuinely thought provoking musings but there is also a bit too much musing of lesser quality. Since a lot of the prose was the random inner musings of the main character, I think Kunkel felt entitled to leave them "in the rough". I would have preferred more cut and polish. I thought that the writer totally failed to give life to the Brigid character and the latter part of the book lacked believability.

He falls into "democratic socialism" in a way that does not jive with his subsequent commitment to the cause. I have often marvelled at how the mainstream media covers the anti-globalization protests of major economic summits without ever allowing the views of the protesters to be heard, leaving one to believe that they are simply a contrary rabble with no clear idea of what they are against. It was disappointing that Kunkel failed to properly develop some kind of expression of this anti-globalization / anti-neo-liberal viewpoint.

He is a young man and I hope he goes on to produce better quality work.

The first 50 pages of Indecision were like brain candy. Specifically, they were like Pop Rocks for my late twenty-something post-ironic soul - a lot of fizzle and the promise of danger, and also some drooling. Every other line in the first quarter of this book made me want to throw it across the room in a fit of envy/admiration. So clever! So right on the money! Aargh, I wish I had thought of this first!

The middle 100 or so pages, however, were different. I started to pick up a rhythm of beats and scenes and sequences, faint at first and then undeniable. The density of good lines decreased sharply and by the time I was about 2/3 of the way through I realized I was reading an extended screenplay/treatment.

The epilogue is really inexplicable. It feels a little Frankensteinish, like some grotesque body part grafted onto the wrong novel. It was as if Mr. Kunkel wanted Dwight to arc from Point A to Point B, realized ten pages from the end that he had not gotten the character anywhere near where he needed to be, emotionally, intellectually or even just geographically in the story, and basically just drew a straight line to the end, as in, voila, here we are.

I think a lot of the negative reviews on here may have been brought on as a result of backlash at the crazy amounts of attention Mr. Kunkel has received, especially from the New York Times. I think he absolutely deserves it - the attention, not the backlash. But I do think this book, for whatever reasons (hopefully not including a rush to completion driven by a justifiably excited publisher) falls way short of the promise it exhibits in the opening chapters.

Still, I know I'm buying his next book no matter what, so I guess that says a lot right there. I guess I was just expecting so much from Jay McInerney's review (that'll teach me) that even an above average reading experience was a severe letdown.

I know this sounds like I'm just trying to be cutsey, but I am honestly undecided of what to like make of this book. Is the prose, "I said like, 'Dude!.'" brilliant, original writing illustrating the decadence and sloppy thought of Dwight, the bright but lazy protagonist, or just bad writing? Hmmm. My tentative conclusion is that it is a talented, but inexperienced writer trying too hard to be original and getting in the way of his own story, but I could be convinced otherwise.

But mostly, I spent most of the first half of the book waiting for the promised story to finally develop, most of the second half thoroughly enjoying the surprising story that did develop, and finally having everything destroyed by an ending that degenerated into a rant on the evils of globalization. And I can't decide if the writer got carried away adding details to Dwight's socialist conversion, or if the whole book was, as it claims to be, a tract to convert the reader to the forces of anti-globalization.

What I found most annoying was the title and book jacket promising a comedy about a chronically indecisive person, cured through pharmacology with comic unintended consequences. Instead, this was a story of how a lazy person used German philosophy to justify avoiding the expectations of his parents until his love for a woman convinced him to switch his allegiance from Wittgenstein to Marx.

Still, the writing was brilliant and original in parts, and the story interesting when it stuck to the story. I suspect that most people will either love this book or hate it, with few people like me stuck in the middle. If you're looking for an anti-globalization love story, with plenty of philosophy and sometimes penetrating insights, there is not another book you'll enjoy more. If you're looking for a traditional novel and are expecting the pharmacological comedy promised by the book jacket, you'll be very disappointed.

The true praise for this book should be reserved for its publicist and the strings they pulled to get the three glowing reviews I've read. If this were indeed a talented rendering of the cultural overload created by an abundance of meaningless possibilities, it would be both more self-aware and more varied in its rendering of supporting characters. Instead, it reads as a self-engrossed blog. Some credit is due the author for approximately 20 pages describing a show down with his father. Taken alone, these pages would make a compelling short story. Smothered in the rest of the text, they are not enough to convince me that the purchase price and reading time were well spent.

In his debut "Indecision: A Novel," Benjamin Kunkel, clearly a writer's writer, has such a snappy style, that I almost felt compelled to read each sentence twice in order to fully appreciate everything being written, and not to miss some obscure and/or profound point. Now that I finished the book, I'm tempted to re-read the whole thing just to see if I could discover some grand underlying concept (not really).

What, exactly, is "Indecision" all about? Well let's see: it's about a neurotic guy in his late 20's, living with some eccentric roomates (are there any other kind?), a few blocks away from the World Trade Center before and after 9/11. It's about a dysfunctional family; finding true love (and wonderful sex); experiencing illegal, unknown, experimental and fake drugs; traveling to Ecuador; left-wing politics; the exploitation of third world countries (especially their natural resources); the corporate destruction of the Amazon rain forest; organizing a class reunion; and the problems that come with indecisiveness. And all of this in 241 pages!

To be honest, I certainly can empathize with the bad reviews. Kunkel is obviously often too clever for his own good, and his character development and dialogue could stand some improvement (see my review on Nicola Barker's "Clear: A Transparent Novel" [notice the similar title?], for a similar problem I had with another "snappy" book). But I see the talent, and plan to read Kunkel's next work, which, I hope, might be somewhat less ambitious.

I had one big problem with the story that kept bothering me. Didn't the events of 9/11 dominate most American's thoughts for at least several months? Wouldn't this especially be true for those who lived only a few blocks away from Ground Zero? Neither Dwight nor the other characters seemed to think much about it, which I just couldn't understand or accept.

Many with strong negative reactions to this book appear to find its confused, questing main character, Dwight, superficial and annoying. This may or may not be true, depending on your tolerance for privileged, navel-gazing young urbanites, but it seems to me beside the point. Just because a book is about someone superficial and annoying doesn't necessarily mean the book is.

The real question is: does this novel accurately reflect and/or offer authentic insights into problems of living in the modern world?

Okay, so that was really two questions, but I think the answer to both is a resounding yes, though I'm still sorting out what exactly those insights might be.

Perhaps one is that a certain shopping mentality has extended beyond the mall and infected our decision-making about life -- about mating, beliefs, career, and on. With more and more options available to us every day, it becomes more and more difficult to decide on anything, or anyone (now that you can shop for dates online too). And even when we do decide, don't we always have the feeling that something better is just around the corner?

I think the book is also trying to say something about a certain emerging crisis in masculinity. All the women in the book - Dwight's sister, his girlfriends - come off as together and grounded, filled with passion and goals. The men, on the other hand -- Dwight, his roommates, his father -- despite their clear intelligence, seem rudderless and morally adrift, and are more or less looking for women to save them from themselves.

I can't help but feel that this has something to do with an under-explored downside of feminism - that while women have enjoyed a huge expansion in possibilities over the past 30 years, men have not, and in fact men's importance in life has actually diminished.

So then, isn't chronic indecision a natural reaction to too many choices, each of which represents a disappointedly diminished possibility? Why choose at all when all the choices will probably stink anyway?

These are some of the issues this book explores, with great humor and empathy. I enjoyed this book and its quasi-philosophical ramblings. I now eagerly await Mr. Kunkel's next effort.

I think the good reviews for this novel in the "literary press" can be explained by the fact that this book is more of a writer's book than a reader's book, but that could probably be said of a lot of good books (MOBY DICK and THE SOUND AND THE FURY come to mind.) As a reader who fancies himself something of a writer, I found quite a lot to admire. Some of the sentences were striking and memorable (and convoluted). I think Kunkel's second novel, assuming there will be one, will cause critics and readers to look back at this one and declare him a marvelous ventriloquist. I think a lot of the frustration in the readers' reviews is a frustration with the very specific voice of the narrator rather than a frustration with the writer. Kunkel is a damned good writer of individual SCENES; several are unforgettable: Dwight gets drunk with his father, Dwight gets caught masturbating in the tent, Dwight does ecstacy with his roommates, Dwight sees the second plane. I can't say it was an absolute pleasure to read this novel, but I don't just read for pleasure. I recommend it.

As a 28 year-old writer, urban resident and someone who is constantly devising a "grand plan" for life, I read Jay McInerney's slobbering review in the NY Times about Kunkel's novel with excitement. Finally, here was a novel - removed from a literary landscape inundated with self-referential chick lit - that dealt with the world view and predicament of an American male of upper middle-class heritage like myself.

I appreciate Kunkel's effort to examine the modes of belief among the slacker class and their elevated style of bohemian ennui. I loved the chapters in New York and thought that he encapsulated the post-college, "OK, so what do I do now?" conundrum quite well. The first 60 pages are excellent and captivated my attention. There were chapters after that that I liked quite well as well. And the guy can certainly put a good sentence together.

But I thought the execution of Dwight the slacker to Dwight the believer was trite, unconvincing and somewhat cliched. The whole drug trip in Ecuador, the revelation about "democratic socialism" - it was just, well, silly. It just wasn't profound. It didn't point to any real new way of looking at the world. By couching his character's arc in the language of 60s revelation and revolution, Kunkel copped out from creating something new, and sank back into the overwrought romantic fantasies of that era. Much of whether you like this novel or not hinges on how much you come to appreciate Dwight's cleverness and jokes to his friends (I didn't).

As a novel composed of vignettes - the relationship with Vaneetha, the ruminations about his job at Pfizer - the novel is satisfying; but as a vision about a modern life infused with belief, it isn't convincing.

Not a bad novel at all but not worth the hype.

Actually, first the good: I laughed out loud around 3 times, I think, mainly at the drinking and drug induced moments of clarity that Dwight would have and were pretty funny. Those were the only times I felt I could come anywhere near to relating to these characters, who in real life, I would avoid like a plague of abulea. Although, in real life, they would all be exactly the same annoying person.

Beyond that, I think I have neck strain from shaking my head in disbelief about how stupid and predictable the plot was, how lame and flat the characters were, how hard the author tried to make some vague cliched statement about "our generation". That last one might be what set me off and prompted me to write this the most. It was like the angry fantasy an older generation might have about how people in their twenties are "these days". Am I reacting to things I recognize in myself? Partly, I'm sure. But it's not nearly the whole story. This was like a cartoon. A cardboard Onion-esque joke, but without a punchline or irony.

Vapid and over-educated, dull, self-important and mean characters are supposed to represent our generation? New Yorkers should be torqued off for this portayal. The slacker cliche has been marketed out of relevance. MOVE ON. It rang false and poisonous even when "Generation X" came out.

For a few minutes I thought, Oh! it's a retooling of Camus' "The Stranger", great! Dwight is so aimless and nihilistic and he's going to surprise us with some impulsive move. Well, no. Far from surprising, he moves around like an emasculated drone and when he starts having vague "suicidal ideation", you wish he'd get on with it. His weak, self-serving (which he's never called out on) morals, and lack of will keep him rolling on to a stunningly runny whack off fantasy of a conclusion.

Here's how I'd like to leave this book and review... with my own fantasy that the author hates his characters as much as I do. That it was all a big joke, and in his next book, which I'm sure he's writing, Dwight is murdered by Bolivian "democratic socialists" who became annoyed with his philosophical diarrhea. That kind a twist would represent "our generation"!