Customer Reviews

Nine Below Zero

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

 

 

I love Kevin Canty's work. He is my favorite author and I can't wait for him to write another book (of course his new collection is due out very soon!). This book, however, isn't for everyone. There are twists and turns of plot, but the main topic of this novel is the struggle within the main characters. Canty has a way with manipulating the psyches of depressed and lonely people; he has a unique ability to show the deepness and complexity of human emotion like no other writer that is alive today. If you have never read Kevin before I suggest you read his other novel first (Into The Great Wide Open, or evenn better, read his short story collection, A Stranger In This World, that is the best book I own!!), simply because this book is a lot to handle if you don't know what to expect. You should expect long narrative sequences that dive into the minds of the characters. No thought is left out, EVERYTHING is thought about and with complete honesty, something that is hard to find nowadays. I am at a loss for words to describe this book. Usually in modern fiction there is no more to learn than a moral lesson or a cleverly disguised metaphor, but by reading Canty I have again seen the core of human emotion; I have relearned how people see each other and how they think. BEST BOOK YOU WILL READ by a modern American author. BUY IT!!!

Oh, Kevin Canty is sad. At least his books are sad and I like them that way. In this book his characters cannot get out of their own heads. Although they try, although they are suffering, they cannot help themselves. This is why the elements of cold--nine below zero in Montana--are so striking. The physical reality of the book is in sharp contrast to the inner workings of the characters. This book is like needles and ice and all that is stupid and beautiful at the same time. If you haven't read Canty before, read him. You will love it, I think.

Kevin Canty has a gift for developing complex characters. This book is in many ways an expansion of his remarkable short stories in A Stranger in This World. Seemingly simple characters become more and more complex with every wrong decision that is made, involving the reader in their increasingly desperate situations.

The book is set in MONTANA. That is it---the only good!!
The writing in this----the writing in this----the writing
in this---(this is an example of the author's writing
style--keep repeating the same words)is horrible. The
""sex"" parts of this book are graphic and in bad taste.
The people in this book were---???----all on drugs???---
and i wanted to shoot all-all-all of them!! I did finish
the book---I was hoping!!---but---it was a complete waste
of time. This is the kind of book that really shows the
difference in the rating system here at AMAZON.

Loving Kevin Canty's other works I picked up this newest adition. It started slow and grew slower and slower. Some chapters were ok but overall it dragged on for 400 pages. I recomend reading Into The Great Wide Open again instead of this.

I was really excited to read "Nine Below Zero" after reading Kevin Canty's first novel, "Into The Great Wide Open," but this one kind of left me cold (so to speak.) I don't mind a book that's bleak if there's a teensy ray of hope somewhere, but Canty can't seem to offer us one. Sure, "Into the Great Wide Open" was also about a man obsessed with a screwed-up woman, but in that book, he was able to give us a sense of why the man found the woman so compelling. In "Nine Below Zero," it's much harder to figure out why the man would even give the woman the time of day. That said, Canty does describe the Montana landscape beautifully, and his writing has an attractively spare and clean quality.

Since his brilliant debut with the short story collection, A Stranger in This World, Kevin Canty has yet to achieve that same level of taut, precarious ennui. In contrast to the upside-down world of his short stories, his two novels read like those substance abuse pamphlets you pick up on the mental hygiene floors of hospitals. The psuedo-protagonist in Nine Below Zero, Jess, ceases to fascinate after the first twenty pages...she is entirely unsympathetic, but also not even delightfully odious as many of canty's short story characters are. Her boredom and restlessness is alive and seething; so much so that the reader inevitably begins to share such feelings as the novel stumbles past 300 pages toward an ending that neither shocks nor titillates, canty's hitherto trademark signatures.

I guess this just isn't "my kind of book." Depressing, unlikable characters, no matter how well written, made this tough going for me. While the author has an excellent writing style, the story and its protagonist left me cold.

This has to be the worse book I have ever read. The characters do not seem to have a straight thought in the entire book. The writing is disjointed. The plot lines lead nowhere. A thoroghly disappointing ending and sludging through all those pages of drivel.

A very disappointing book. I read the first chapter of Nine Below Zero in the bookstore and couldn't wait to get it home to finish it. While I don't mind reading a dark novel, it would certainly help if I liked the characters, and I did not like one in this novel. Justine in particular grated on my nerves. She is extremely selfish and immature and her self degradation grew weary. I just didn't care. Marvin turned out to be the biggest disappointment. In the first chapter he is funny and insightful. By the end of the novel he is just pathetic.