Since moving to New York City 10 years ago, I have been as fascinated with rats as Robert Sullivan. Well, maybe not fascinated enough to sit with them each night for a year, but if I'd known him personally during his research phase, I would have been one of the people he describes who begged to go observing rats with him in Eden's Alley.
When I saw the ad for this book appear in the New Yorker magazine, I immediately ordered it from Amazon. Impatiently waiting for it to arrive, I read the first chapter in Colosseum Books with giddy eagerness. I was thinking of ever-so-mischeviously giving it as a birthday gift to my partner, a lifelong New Yorker and rat despiser whose skin crawls and/or body reacts at the mere utterance of the word Rat. But (1) the gift was really for me and (2) I couldn't wait that long to read it, so I told him about the book and how "funny" it would have been when he opened it and saw what was in front of him (he literally shuddered at the thought). It finally arrived and I tore into it like a rat into a garbage bag of rotting food.
The first chapter talks about how and why he came to write the book. Near the end, he says (I'm paraphrasing) "But enough about me. You're here to read about rats, so let's get right to it."
As promised, next comes chapter two, chock full of rat statistics and a potpourri of various rat information. Suddenly it was akin to going down the first hill of a roller coaster or seeing a rare scary film that actually scares you. It freaked me out -- I'm sure that my eyes were wide and my mouth was dropped while I was reading -- and I wondered if I was going to be able to stomach the entire book.
But then came the remaining chapters. In chapter three or four, I believe, there is a hair-raising and extremely engaging anecdote that he and two friends personally experienced involving a herd of rats in Theatre Alley. But soon, as I gave progress reports to my partner about the experience of reading the book, I complained, "Too much of the book is not about rats."
That is my big grievance and for a book about rats, I'd say it's a fairly huge one. Apparently there is not enough about rats to fill a book, or at least Mr. Sullivan couldn't find enough. He explores various subjects that are often only indirectly rat-related, and will spend the bulk of a chapter giving the history of a person or situation. Very often I found myself wondering, "When or how is this going to tie into rats?"
Somewhere between halfway and three quarters of the way through the book, I finally got fed up and decided to skim the remaining pages until he said something about rats, at which point I would suddenly perk up. Look! Something about rats! Who would have thought? Then wading through several more pages of ratless historical context that I no longer subjected myself to, although sometimes he would trick me by throwing the word Rat in at random. I would nibble at what little morsel there was, or see that there was no nutritional value, and continue rummaging through the pages looking for more.
In the end I felt not only disappointed but cheated. Surely he could have filled a book twice this size with interesting rat information, anecdotes, tales of horror, first person accounts, etc. As it is, this book could be edited down to make an excellent article for The New Yorker, of which he is a frequent contributor (and which explains the well placed ad that hooked me). His running thesis of comparing rats to humans would also have been more convincing, funny and charming in magazine article form, but instead it becomes weak, thinly stretched and silly.
By the end, it is clear that he is grasping at anything trying to make his book interesting (and pretty much not succeeding). He more or less confesses that he's struggling to find a way to wrap up the book, which sure doesn't lend much confidence in him as an author. At least it's clear that he knew his writing was weak -- but why publish it before it was ready? He seems to be not untalented, just lazy. If it had to be padded for lack of substantial material, I would have preferred larger type and at least a few pictures, or a complete reformatting, a makeover: leave the interesting stuff in, throw the irrelevant stuff out, make the first letter of the first sentence of each chapter take up half the page, with little rat nibblings along the edge of said letter. Anything!
If you're still intrigued enough with rats to read it -- as I probably would be even after reading this critique -- at least don't waste your money on it. Get it from a library, read it in a bookstore, or wait for it to come out in paperback. And remember -- it's okay to skip the endless paragraphs and pages that aren't about rats; you're not missing a thing.
