Customer Reviews

Lucky Wander Boy

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

D.B. Weiss' first novel, "Lucky Wander Boy", is a story seemingly about a young man who ruins his life because of his obsession with the video games of his youth, and one game in particular - Lucky Wander Boy. But don't be fooled! The Video games that populate this book are every bit the McGuffin as was the black bird of Hitchcock's "Maltese Falcon". As you read, you will become increasingly aware that the story is really about something very different. It explores the protagonist Adam Pennyman's relationship to life as expressed thru the video games he plays and often worships.
The book is tightly written and cleverly concieved. Unless you have the vocabulary of a William Styron, you may want to keep a Webster's handy. The story alternates between narrative and sections of explanation and exposition about various videogames, some real and some the product of Weiss' quirky imagination. You may find this movement disconcerting or even confusing, but be patient as the confusion is purposeful and a necessary part of the creation of the mindset through which Pennyman views life.
You may also find that the portrayal of the people who populate Pennyman's world are sketchy and poorly defined. This is also an interesting device, as the author brings us to see that Pennyman views the real people with whom he lives (and sometimes loves) as characters in the video games he plays. People who are being moved around the screen of his videogame existance without feelings or real personalities of their own. The clue to this attitude comes early in the book when Pennyman, while watching a TV interview with Kurt Krickstein (a man who will eventually become his employer) remarks, "His childhood features had remained with him, but in the transition to early middle age they had become cartoonish, as grotesque in their own subtle way is the latex F/X creatures in the background behind him. I knew it was hip to like cartoons, but I didn't think it was hip to be one."
This book may grab you by the throat and take you on a wild ride of a reading experience. However, if you are a person who likes formula books where the hero is beset by seemingly unsurmountable challanges and where all the problems are solved and villians vanquished in the last 10 pages, this may not be your idea of a good read. If you are open to a thought-provoking and alternate way of looking at life this intelligent novel will not only be your cup of tea but the entire box of teabags! And the ending may leave you physically and emotionally breathless, as it did me.
Read this book. You may love it - you may hate it. I guarantee that you will turn the final page and feel that you have read something very different.

N. Hernandez
Chicago, Il.

Quite frankly, this book is far better and far more intelligent than it has a right to be. I read it in one sitting, constantly astounded that what was packaged as "High Fidelity for Atari fans," was actually a genuine piece of literature and social criticism. The book is hilariously funny, but without any of the cloying sarcastic sensibilities of most Gen-X novels. Instead, the author uses Pennyman to depict a kind of isolation and obsessiveness that's very familiar nowadays. He's a truly fascinating psychological portrait, an overly smart man who cannot cope with the inanities of the everyday world. So he finds solace in something seemingly even more inane, yet invests it with the entire weight of his scientific intelligence. He reminds me of those people with IQs too high to fit into everday society--the people who wind up bagging groceries while they muse about philosophers and string theory. But what's most remarkable is that the novel is never pretentious, never forced, never desperate. Weiss is a very assured writer, who unravels his complicated plot with patience, and who shows great empathy for his lead character. In short, this brightly packaged book, this tangle of wires put out as a concept--might just be one of the best books of the year. I can't think of another book that so effortlessly seemed to capture the zeitgeist.

Saying this book is just about video games is like saying Moby Dick is just about whaling. Video games are just the medium that Weiss uses to explore his protagonist's search for meaning. The results are fascinating, original and pretty funny to say the least. Like other reviewers have said, as long as you know the basics about the classics such as Pac-Man and Donkey Kong you don't need to be a video game guru to understand what Weiss is selling. I'd recommend this book pretty highly to anyone who likes to read original, thought-provoking novels.

BTW, for those of you that are interested in this sort of thing, the narrative flow reminds me quite a bit of Paul Auster's "City of Glass" or Samuel Beckett's "Murphy" - chaotic and random, but in a good way that keeps the reader off-balance. I know some people have problems with this style, but I personally enjoy it.

I gave up on video games eons ago, when that little ball in Pong started moving faster, so I was reluctant to read this book when a friend insisted that I should. But as it turns out, even those who fail to understand the draw of video games cannot escape their impact on our culture, and Weiss documents that perfectly in his portrait of obsessive, constantly thwarted, yet still hopeful Adam Pennyman. Weiss has captured a generation's search for meaning in a way that Douglas Coupland never will (at least not with Weiss's subtlety, intelligence, and quirky sense of humour). Pennyman is a great character, an interesting mixture of Holden Caulfield and that guy from Revenge of the Nerds (pick any of the nerds). A warning to women who want to read about shopping and boyfriend problems: this isn't for you. But if you like a little complexity in your fiction, read Lucky Wander Boy. You may hate Adam at times, but then you will have to admit that you know way too many guys like him--silently tortured, deeply flawed, but still somehow [interesting].

I've always liked videogames, and always felt a little bit embarrased when my more "intellectual" friends would make fun of me for it, like it wasn't something as worthwhile as reading books or even seeing movies. (I like those things too, but whatever.) Now I've got something I can give the "intellectuals" to let them know that videogames are just as worthwhile a thing to consider as any other form of entertainment. That thing is Lucky Wander Boy!

But really, the heart of this book isn't in its elaborate and hillarious (and just possibly correct!) videogame theories. Lucky Wander Boy is about Adam Pennyman, a guy of about thirty years of age who is starting to realize that his whole adult life has been spent doing, well, nothing in particular, and he's starting to freak out about it (sound familiar?). Because he doesn't want to be a slacker or a loser: he wants to DO something with his life, something worthwhile. So the search for the long lost videogame Lucky Wander Boy symbolizes something very important for him, it's the thing that will provide meaning to his life. Anyway, it doesn't quite work out the way Pennyman would like it to, mostly because what he wants (and the game Lucky Wander Boy itself) is totally impossible.....but impossible in the coolest possible way, which I won't spoil for you by telling you about it.

Definitely check this book out. You won't regret it.

too smart for the bestseller lists, too hip for the g.m.a book club, lucky wander boy is the real deal, plain and simple. a near-brilliant comi-tragic mini-epic. fans of amis (both martin and kingsley) and gibson should rejoice. it's really that good. oh yeah, and as for the video game stuff - if it puts you off, don't let it. i haven't played a video game since i was twelve and it didn't affect my enjoyment of the novel one bit. can't wait to read his next one!

This is definitely the best fiction I've read in a long while. I'm sorry I hadn't read it sooner. It was a total page turner for me, I read it within two days when I was sick recently. I think all of it is still sinking in. I would go so far as to say its like if Vonnegut wrote a story with (video) gaming as an underlying theme. It is told in a similarly often hilarious often seriously scary tone, sometimes clever to a fault, sometimes ranting like anything.
This is definitely about more than video games, but anyone who has grown up with video games in their lives will love this all that much more. If you've ever had a geeky (not geek-chic, mind you) obsession (sick or otherwise) you will find comfort in this story. It plays out something like an acid trip, where all of these minor details, fringe phrases, and various bulldada bounce around until everything seems to fall into place, or not. Sorry, I'm not going to give a plot outline or anything, because you NEED to read this book for yourself. If you've ever sat around and contemplated (seriously, not just when you were stoned) the deeper meanings and semiotics found in the ambiguous shapes and tasks of classic video games, well guess what, someone named D.B. Weiss has met the Moment of Decision, and brought back this grand tale for us all. I can't wait until D.B. Weiss' next book (?) is released, he definitely has a new fan. One complaint I have is that the cover artwork/ design doesn't do the book justice (does it ever?) It's just some bogus stock-photo designy junk that might make it look more "serious" to a yuppie on a shelf at Borders. I love this book. I used to work at a place that was totally like the Portal Plant.

I think it takes a special kind of reader to enjoy D.B. Weiss' Lucky Wander Boy. For instance, it requires someone with a decent knowledge of, and appreciation for, the classic video games referenced, such as Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, etc. Also, it requires someone with more than a passing interest in (or at least a high tolerance for) existential/metaphysical philosophy such as people might indulge in after taking hallucinogenic drugs. Fortunately, I happen to fall right in the requisite audience: I love both video games, and highly abstract thought/philosophy, and so I had myself quite a good time.

Maybe you would, too.

And then, maybe you wouldn't.

There is certainly a lot of potential, here, as this first time author succesfully plays with convention, writing in novel, screen and stage writing formats, not to mention the thread of the entries to a "Catalogue of Obsolete Entertainments" that are always somehow relevant to the larger, surrounding narrative. The ending, without saying too much, is interesting and daring. I am still not certain that it is entirely successful, but it is at least thought-provoking, and that's saying something, right?

In short, the author tells a fine story with an engaging plot and decent characters, and manages to do this while being playful and inventive in his presentation. The philosophy discussed in the piece--the philosophy of video games--is well-done, even if it's obvious that it isn't ever meant to be taken seriously. It leads to a hard question of whether anything in the book is to be taken seriously at all, and I don't have an answer to that, either. The author references Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter (and it has an obvious influence) and it reminds me more of that work in that it seems to delight simply in being clever, rather than the (very serious and purposeful) Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, also referenced. So: does the author really believe that there is philosophical insight to be gained in studying video games? Or, are we just to feel the main character foolish, and a loser, for believing so?

The ending may answer that question for you.

And then, maybe it won't.

This book really did it for me. Every once in a while, a book comes a long that gives you back a version of your own life, but stretched and twisted in a way that tells you things about yourself that you never noticed before, and that's what Lucky Wnader Boy did for me. The thing is, I haven't played videogames for years, but that didn't matter. Lucky Wander Boy did it for me, both as a quest story, a messed-up love story, and an argument for why those games were way more important that I ever imagined!

This perfectly paced novel starts out appealing to a small segment of the population - 30-something men who obsessed over video games in their youth. It immediately and exponentially expands its breadth to cover a wide range of subjects - Darwinian hierarchy, gender relations, popular culture, entertainment, hot chicks -- in a way that will appeal to almost any thoughtful reader today. Insightful but not preachy, intellectual and literary, but not pedantic, uproarious, but highly self-aware of the insanity of one man's destructive video game obsession, this page-turner reads like a wafer-thin piece of chocolate that leaves you sated nonetheless. I remember beating the heck out of woebegone nerds like Adam Pennyman in my long-lost youth. Now I can't get enough of them.