Customer Reviews

Men in Black

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

 

 

Wrenching and oh so funny --maybe the funniest book I've read in five years. Spencer is a national treasure and this is one of his best. If you're interested in love, lying,families, culture, and, yes, sex, this book will have you in its grip.

Roger McDonald writes about Scott Spencer in the Melbourne "Age", 1995"The reason I like Scott Spencer's writing is that it takes me by the nape of the neck and flings me into a world where what happens on the page is as real, as vivid, and as unpredictable as life itself. Years ago Endless Love was his big success, and it still reads brilliantly. Men In Black (Knopf, 1995) is un-put-downable. It is one of those books that as a writer I would have liked to write myself: funny, moving, poetic, and fast-paced. The dialogue is so truthful that it hurts to read it. The depictions of family life and married love would be unbearable if they weren't so truthful and wise. The narrator of Men In Black is an American writer who publishes serious fiction with low sales. His publisher is on his back. He has to produce commissioned non-fiction to keep going. Among his trivia titles are "Travelling With Your Pet", and a book about flying saucers he can hardly remember cobbling together, "Men In Black". The title refers to an urban myth about aliens who pass for humans. They wear summer clothes in winter, winter clothes in summer, and have peculiarly elongated thumbs. In fact, whatever the writer dreams up he slaps onto the page, and in the middle of a family crisis (teenage runaway son, exasperated wife) the book becomes a overnight cult classic. There's a call from his publisher. The author goes on tour across the US impersonating himself. All hell breaks loose. Spencer gives us razor-sharp satire on talkback radio hosts and author-promotion tours, but adds something more. He is a writer with a big heart and a sharp tongue, and the passionate combination of the two is irresistible.Look in vain for Scott Spencer's novels in Australian bookshops. We get container loads of mediocre American books and why he hasn't been picked up beats me. He's stunning."Roger McDonald is the author of six novels, the latest two being The Slap (Picador, Australia) and Mr Darwin's Shooter (Knopf, Australia, and Anchor, UK. in September 1998). He lives in Sydney.

After reading Men In Black I started wondering why more writers couldn't write like Scott Spencer. Spencer is so vivid in his details and writes so comfortably, it's a pleasure to read. Men in Black is an extremely enjoyable look into self identity and what happens when we are truly forced to deal with who we are. After reading Men In Black I picked up Spencer's Endless Love which is equally as well written.

Spencer reveals the primordial madness and primative compulsions that drive the rich and famous, poor and anonymous, young and old. He does it with integrity, sincerity, and humor. The anguish and foolishness of his characters are handled with a tender, loving hand. Men in Black draws you into a circle of failing marriages, talk-show hosts, UFOs, pseudonyms and private detectives that circumscribes contemporary America. The ambivalence of human emotions is brilliantly exposed yet,somehow, Spencer makes you feel all right to be part of this humanity.

The preceeding reviews have done enough to describe the plot and development of the book, so I will simply say I enjoyed reading it greatly. Spencer does a fine job exploring the characters and their emotional development. Recommended for any reader of modern fiction.

I went along for the ride with Mr. Spencer, and for the longest time I thought we were going somewhere...together. Ultimately ,Sam Holland comes across as a confused man. A helpless male. A jerk who cheats on the wife he loves because he can't control the monster behind his zipper. A man who practices unsafe sex with the woman he casually sleeps with. But hey, that's fine because at story's end his wife tells him that she has slept with a private detective (with a penis so large that it caused her pain as it bumped her cervix) and she wants Sam to know that the guy "refused to wear a condom" ("and that just enraged me") so she may have "picked up a disease."

From the disturbed son who lives in the woods and robs houses, to the throw-away adultery motif Men In Black ultimately left me feeling like I had just spent time with some very annoying, very dumb people who (at the heart of it all) are, quite simply, their own worst enemies.

Kevin Ormsby, Niagara Falls, NY

After hearing Scott Spencer on NPR recently I was eager to read one of his novels. Perhaps I chose poorly because I was disappointed by Men in Black. The story is engaging at first and at times takes interesting turns, but the characters are all so unlikable and their choices so frustrating that the book put me in a bad mood every time I opened it. One could argue that a great book moves the reader, sometimes in directions that make him uncomfortable. Maybe that's the case. So I move on to my other criticisms. Regarding structure, it felt like an early draft. I was baffled by the seemingly unmotivated change of person (from first to third and back). Unlike in The Poisonwood Bible, the change of person in Men in Black seems like a "cheat" rather than a stylistic choice. And Spencer's decision to drop the other POVs entirely--and the corresponding subplots with them--in the final section of the book left me feeling unsatisfied and scratching my head (another reviewer talks about this so I won't go into details). Finally, I was very annoyed by the tangential metaphors that dripped from the pages like my melting snow cone on the beach in Acapulco when I was ten (in case you needed an example of what I'm talking about). I'm not an avid reader of current literary fiction; perhaps this kind of writing is in fashion. I find it pretentious and self-important. Because the narrator is a writer I can't say whether this annoying technique was Spencer's or Sam's (the narrator, who IS quite pretentious and self-important). If it's the latter it's a quite brilliant use of first person narrative to help characterize Sam. I'm just not so sure. To be fair, there were parts that I liked and I might give Spencer a second chance, but overall Men in Black was disappointing.

While "Men in Black" has its moments, its overall feel is more of a sketch or an outline for a story than a fully-developed one. Spencer's prose style is excellent and it does draw you in, but too many story strands are left dangling. Sub-plots, in particular one about his runaway son's adventure, are begun and then effectively dropped. That one and two other important ones are resolved "off-stage", their results told to the protagonist toward the end of the book. Characters, like Sam's father and his wife's sister, are brought into the story and dropped immediately, wasting page space. This novel is about average in length, just as I like, but I actually think it could have benefitted from about fifty more pages to better flesh out its intertwined plot. While its random events are life-like, they don't make for a very satisfying story. Here's hoping that in the future Spencer can develop a solid story to benefit from his great prose ability.

Sam Holland, one-time serious author of two well-received novels, can barely pay his bills until a book he tossed off and published pseudonymously starts flying off the shelves. His Visitors from Above is a hit among conspiracy theorists, all UFOs and alien abductions and the enigmatic disinformation specialists of Scott Spencer's title--those fellows who, "sallow of complexion" and inappropriately dressed, can convince alien spotters, Tommy Lee Jones-like, that they haven't seen anything whatever out of the ordinary. But financial success and the celebrity of a national book tour are difficult to swallow when they spring from a product Sam can neither feel proud of nor claim as his own. They are, moreover, empty rewards against the backdrop of Sam's crumbling personal life, his failing marriage, his teenaged son's recent disappearance.

Scott Spencer's Men in Black offers readers a complex story about one man's belated recognition of his life's value. Unfortunately, Spencer's late bloomer was not a man I could empathize with. Sam and his wife and son, the characters through whose eyes the story is told, are unlikable creatures who are dissatisfied with their circumstances--the perfectly good, indeed arguably enviable circumstances of their lives--and they make matters worse for themselves by behaving badly. In the end I did not care what the Hollands wound up doing with their lives--though I was certain alien abduction was not in the cards for them--figuring that they had merited whatever unpleasantness (divorce, incarceration) might lay in store after the last page. A good premise, then, but Men in Black fails, finally, because its characters cannot engage the reader's emotions.

Reviewed by Debra Hamel, author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece