Customer Reviews

Plain and Normal: A Novel

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I started John Grisham's "The Partners" and put it aside for Ellen Douglas'(the best of writers) "Can't Quit You, Baby"; then put it aside until I could read, nonstop, James Wilcox's "Plain and Normal".

This book made me order James Wilcox's other books. I particularly liked Pearl Fay Norris who tries to make her "husband" (whom she never has had sex with) come out of the closet and be more gay. I will anxiously await more books from this terrific writer.

There should be more literary characters like Lloyd. He is funny and eccentric (he lives on chips--how can you NOT love him)!!! Plain and Normal also demonstates the old notion that things aren't always as they seem. If you like to laugh and you enjoy good literature, then get this book.

He is a sensitive master that makes a heartfelt problem hilarious. Wilcox is a comic genius!

In Wilcox's newest novel, a comedy of mistaken (sexual and otherwise) identities, he takes the reader to the place in the psyche that lies smack in the middle of ache and hope, and he covers the territory with humor and compassion in a way unmatched by any other author around. If the landmarks go by too quickly at first, you may want to go back to the beginning, but then hang on and and enjoy the masterfully loopy and heart-swelling ride!

Wilcox is capable of better than this--Plain & Normal reads like his deadline was due and he handed in his unedited notes. Nothing happens; there's no plot--that's fine if you have arresting characters, but this book is totally peopled by schmendricks who have no dimension or likeability. He also veers wildly between two plots, neither of which have much human interest and never really intersect. Could have been a good book with a lot of re-writing and editing, but Plain & Normal just sits there.

Wilcox's style is clear, his tone understated, and his sense of fun outrageous. This book perhaps fails to equal Modern Baptists, Miss Undine's Living Room, or Polite Sex. However, even average Wilcox is satisfying.

Who can take seriously the previous reader's one-star review (Maloney)? He says he has a doctorate, yet he misspells "publish" and misuses an apostrophe and a semi-colon, all in the span of a few lines. His doctorate evidently wasn't in the field of English.

But enough cat-fighting.

If you haven't read any James Wilcox, you're in for a treat. Read all the Wilcox novels you can lay your hands on...and you don't even need a doctoral degree.

I was disappointed by only one thing in this hilarious and wonderful new novel: that it ended. The author rarely stopped to let me catch my breath, but kept the finely-tweaked farce speeding along in a relay race of one improbable character after another plunging into an ever-denser forest of plot complications. I laughed page after page, line after line, but every so often Wilcox surprised me with an unexpected moment of pure poetry. What is mainly a most unlikely gay coming-out story ends on a touching note of reconciliation between two old friends. There is a subtle theme of acceptance of human diversity and its relationship to the oft-mentioned Catholicism of the main characters: a graceful portrayal of Christian grace, if you will. This is my first James Wilcox novel, but it certainly won't be my last!

THis charming book made me smile. James Wilcox writes in a fluid, beautiful manner and his book undoubtedly is one of the best i have read in a long, long time. I am so please i got an advanced copy and got to read this treasure. Go Mr. Wilcox!!!

Compared to the previous Wilcox novels, "Plain and Normal" is flat and uninteresting. The two plots do not reflect one another, and they do not mesh in any meaningful way. I hope new readers of Wilcox will not judge his work by this novel. Please read the delightful and masterful "Modern Baptists" or "Guests of a Sinner."