Customer Reviews

Pretend All Your Life

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

A strong surprise of a book, this work is is a stone-hard story about living while dying, and about what it means to need and not to. The images Mackin presents are striking and original, and will linger in your mind long after you've finished the novel. This is a story you have not been told.

The prose is lithe and becoming, sly but always honest. He will tell you things you know but don't say, and things you say but don't know. And if you listen right, there's a heart in this story that beats louder than the noises that keep you from hearing your own. This novel reads like a Dostoevsky introduction to Robert Franks' snapshots of that great American sadness that we have never been able to distinguish from wealth. It is relentless but never tiring, it thinks without being meditative, and speaks, but never louder than truth is spoken.

As you choke with Gallin on the bright sick air or smell with Miguel the smoldering of hope or writhe with Bernardo in the empty space of fear, you know you are in the hands of a writer that claims honor for his craft. This book has all the death and wideness of a clear October afternoon and all the warmth of its evening. It should not be missed

Remember all the dark thoughts many people harbored after 9/11--despair, grief, revenge, survival, protection and opportunity? In Pretend All Your Life, erudite wordsmith Joseph Mackin thoroughly taps into them. At times unsettling, Pretend All Your Life is pierced with hopeful moments. It delves into loss and reinvention. There are also those who saw 9/11 as the chance to try new projects, personas, careers, starts. Dr. Richard Gallin is an art collector, plastic surgeon and man with vast wealth. So much that he doesn't know what to do with it sometimes. His only child Bernardo, who worked in finance, died in the Towers that morning, his wedding ring found among the wreckage. Gallin finds he's no longer alone in his turmoil. The entire city has strangely transformed as its inhabitants and the rest of the nation cope with the unimaginable loss, frustration and new vulnerability. When Gallin's son appears one night with a unique proposal for his father, Gallin's world gets turned upside down. Amidst the tragedy, Mackin finds a sense of logic and renewal for his characters. The end result is the potent, refreshing post-9/11 novel Pretend All Your Life.

Set in New York City during the year following 9/11, Joseph Mackin's Pretend All Your Life examines this calamity's lingering impact on the life of plastic surgeon Richard Gallin and his family. Still reeling from the death of his wife and believing that his twenty-something son lies lost amidst the ruins of the World Trade Center, Gallin finds himself unable to sustain his once-lucrative medical practice or maintain a meaningful relationship with another woman. Things grow more complicated when his lost son mysteriously reapppears with a maddening request, and the gay partner of his former nurse, whom Gallin fired because he contracted AIDS, threatens to destroy his reputation. With a set-up this tantalizing and a cast of vividly drawn characters who spring to life on the page, I quickly got caught up in this novel, its only weakness seeming to be the author's occasional tendency to over-write.

I also admired the way in which Mackin took advice Gallin had given to his son ("Pretend to be a thing all of your life . . . and at the end of your life that's what you'll have been -- the thing you pretend to be") and used it as the central theme and title of his story. Gallin, a pretender in so many ways that by the end of the book I had no idea what he truly stands for or believes in, finds his advice turned completely on its head by his son, who is determined to abandon everything about his pretend life as a successful Wall Street investment banker to begin a new, honest existence.

This novel was well on its way to five stars when it came to a rather abrupt ending. It was almost as if Mackin lost interest in his novel at the very moment when his plot and characters had hit full stride. I can appreciate a good ambiguous ending and the lingering thoughts it can leave behind, but this one came too early for the plot or themes of this work to germinate to my full satisfaction.

Joseph Mackin's debut novel is nothing short of understated brilliance. The intricate character development, thought processes and interaction are deftly woven into a personal story that exemplify the complex life challenges that exist during the first decade of the 21st century. A dramatic post 9/11 New York portrait told by an insightful mind and written with great care, intrigue and purpose, Pretend All Your Life is a book that will keep you thinking long after the last page is read. An awesome initial book for an extremely gifted writer.

Pretend All Your Life portrays a slice of life representing many of the emotional challenges seen throughout an entire lifetime. The very subtle backdrop of 9/11 was refreshing in that it played a quiet role in setting a tone reminiscent of how the world felt at that time. The glimpses into NYC subcultures and Gallin's experiences within them were interesting and showed how people from different "worlds" perceive and judge each other only to then find surprising similarities in their struggles and goals. Pretend All your Life was an enjoyable read with great descriptions and thought provoking analogies. It made you think, "what would i do?" and created sympathy and empathy for people and tales that on the surface would seem hard to understand or accept. The book only scratches the surface of so many things, but gives just enough to make you want to keep reading and wondering about the story and its characters when you finish.

Not too long ago I read Saturday, a novel by Ian McEwan that details the events of a single day. I really loved it. When I read that the events in Joseph Mackin's Pretend All Your Life take place over just six days, I found myself wondering how it would compare. When I started to read, I realized it compares very well.

The protagonist in both books is a medical professional, but Joseph Mackin's protagonist, Dr. Gallin, is a plastic surgeon rather than a neurosurgeon. The novel reflects this specialty from the myriad surfaces of thoughts, lives and events that it depicts--sharp surfaces that cut, and mirrors that reflect. As New York struggles with its own new face in the aftermath of 9/11, so Dr. Gallin searches for identity among the people and purposes surrounding him. Is it all about appearances, or do appearances shape truth?

Gallin once told his son "Pretend to be a thing all your life and at the end that's what you'll have been..." But what if you change what you're pretending? What if someone makes the pretence impossible? And what if what you've pretended turns out not to be what you want?

The doctor shapes people's bodies because what's on the outside really does matter. But terrorists have reshaped New York. Death has reshaped the lives of survivors. Sickness reshapes security and threats change the shape of hope. Meanwhile a woman sculpts a form that might be her best piece of work, and waits for art itself to define its completion.

Perhaps that's what Gallin's waiting for too in this six-day pause before the future.

The end of the book seemed surprisingly abrupt, newly sculpted changes, deliberate and accidental, suddenly coming to fruition. But then, change often is abrupt, and escape might be a new beginning or simply the next turn in the road. It felt right, and I put the book down with a sigh.

I enjoyed reading this book. I liked the way the author made me view identity, and the way he juxtaposed large themes and small. The weight of fate felt similar to many of Ian McEwan's books, but an underlying lightness of touch made me think of McEwan's world relieved by penthouse sun and well-placed art. This was a very satisfying novel, deeply intriguing, curiously thought-provoking, and a really good tale.

So now I've reviewed three books from the Permanent Press, and I've loved them all. I have a feeling I'll soon be guaranteeing that I'll really enjoy anything they publish - I'll be raiding the library for last year's books, and the year before's...

Richard Gallin is a man who has had a successful career in New York transforming people who are uncomfortable within their skin. After 9/11 however, his plastic surgery practice has been reduced, as if people no longer have an interest in becoming the people they pretend to be. Dr. Gallin always had evangelistic fervor about plastic surgery in spite of a general professional opinion that it was a trivial specialty. Years ago Richard's mentor taught him, who is to say that changing the outside is any less important to the health of a person than changing the inside?

The destruction of the Twin Towers caused Dr. Gallin to lose his professional dedication and to doubt his self confidence. He realized that what is lost in plastic surgery (pounds of cellulose sucked out of waists, scar tissue removed from the skin, cartilage chiseled from the nose) is more important than the cosmetic gains. Patients lose their original identity and are no longer themselves. Richard's father taught him that if people pretend long enough they end up being what they pretend to be. Comparison with other people then begs the question, was that a life I would have taken, would I trade?

Dr. Gallin gets an opportunity to go back in time, allowing him to restructure his past. Should he cut his losses to the bone and resurrect himself or take irrevocable steps to protect his pretenses. This wonderfully written novel tells the story of the insight Richard gains from several characters experiencing similar struggles with personal choices in a world that changed completely in a single day. This is an excellent story, perhaps unsettling to readers who have repressed the emotions they experienced in the time after 9/11 or some other life changing incident. It may be that solitude is the ground zero of free will.

I enjoyed this book very much. I didn't want it to end, and I thought about it for days after I finished it.

From the first paragraph of Joe Mackin's book, Pretend All Your Life, I found his writing to be unsophisticated and cliche. The characters are so poorly developed that his attempt to create adversaries of Gallin and Adam verge on parody, his narrative trivial to the point of being harshly banal and his pedantry tiresome. If Mr. Mackin is attempting to aspire to the dark and elegiacal prose of Andre Dubus III he has dismally failed.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 have become part of our cultural back story. But they also have provided fodder for fiction writers. Amazon.com lists 28 novels with 9/11-attack plot elements, ranging from such memorable offerings as The Kite Runner and Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close to less-remembered works such as The Last Night of a Damned Soul and Prayers for the Assassin. Now newcomer Joseph Mackin has set his debut novel, Pretend All Your Life, in the aftermath of the World Trade Center tragedy.
Richard Gallin, a well established plastic surgeon in Manhattan, has been going through the motions of regular life since the apparent loss of his only son, Bernardo, a financial genius whose office in the Twin Towers took a direct hit from the first plane. As he struggles to make sense of his loss, he finds himself under attack by a would-be investigative journalist set on avenging his lover, a nurse whom Gallin fired for fear the man's AIDS would pose a risk to his high-society patients.
Before Gallin can devise a strategy for coping with the journalist - implausibly named for Ernest Hemingway's fictional alter ego Nick Adams - Bernardo, miraculously spared his martyr's death, reappears and asks for his father's help in creating a new persona.
Mackin, whose biography includes a stint as Internet editor for Paris Review, violates the novelistic imperative to show, rather than tell, readers a character's character. Bernardo, for example, is introduced by more than five pages of summary background material, but the most potentially interesting details - how he lived in the weeks following the tragedy - are left out.
Much of the book smacks of being a first draft of a possibly interesting novel. It cries out for a strong editorial hand that would have curbed the author's enthusiasm for extended and awkward metaphors, such as "Regret collected in her like kitchen grease till it was solid and clogged her heart." The tragedy of September 11 becomes a piece of backdrop rather than a dynamic part of the plot, and Gallin, the protagonist, is singularly unlikeable without ever rising to the level of anti-hero.