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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Honest with Me,
By
This review is from: Self Help (Paperback)
Gabriel Glover lives in London and struggles to hold together a self help magazine he despises, basically writing most of the copy and doing the design work himself given his incompetent lazy staff. One night Gabriel receives a distressing phone call from his mother Masha who lives in St Petersburg. She presses upon him metaphysical advice and laments the demise of people's ability to inhabit themselves fully. Bothered by the worrisome sound of her voice and her bouts of coughing, he races to Russia only to find her dead in her apartment. Gabriel and his twin sister Isabella search throughout this novel to discover who their mother really was and, more pressingly, who they are themselves. Amidst their quest, their despised philandering father Nicholas must admit some secrets which both he and Masha carefully withheld from their children. Masha's illegitimate son Arkady holds the key to breaking the silence between the father and his grieving children. The pessimistic Arkady is searching to find some way to finance his musical education and wants to see if the Glover relatives who he's never met will help him. He is a gifted pianist that has seen his talent squandered in the shifting gears of Russia's transforming political system. Even more committed to Arkady's education is his friend Henry who is a teacher with an unfortunate drug habit. In the last hundred pages of this sprawling novel, the strands of these characters' stories come together to unearth some surprising revelations and a heart-breaking climax.
Docx has produced a powerful family novel teeming with rich ideas and universal themes concerning identity, loss and social/familial dislocation. Each character is explored in depth and with great sympathy. Nicholas' psychology and relationship with his young male lover who schemes to get a steady allowance from the older man is complexly drawn. Henry sees his resources dwindling in his struggle to assist Arkady and kick his drug addiction. His slow downward spiral is written in a way that feels harrowing and true. However, this portion of the story seems glued on to the larger narrative about this family's struggle to reunite and discover how they fit together. This is a difficult novel which yields many great rewards, but the story can be a bit unwieldy in its focus at times. One of Docx's greatest talents is for describing the numerous cities this novel travels through over the course of the story. St Petersburg, Paris, London and New York are all vividly evoked in rich sensual detail giving real character to the places and making them physically real. More than that, he holds up a reflection of the values and sensibility of Russia compared to the West. Docx has many intelligent and heartfelt things to say about the responsibility we have to accept ourselves fully. While Self Help isn't meant to be prescriptive, it does give you a lot to think about.
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointing,
By
This review is from: Pravda: A Novel (Paperback)
It is hard to be critical of an author with significant potential but that is the case with Pravda. Edward Docx is a writer with not insignificant talent. One can't read Pravda without recognizing what seems to be a gift for capturing internal monologue. In addition, his ability to detail the complexities of emotional and psychological struggles is evident. Yet, despite these obvious talents, the flaws of Pravda bring down what otherwise could have been an excellent novel.
Overall what comes to mind in reviewing Pravda is the famous quote from Hamlet "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Docx often presents his characters as having worked out some fundamental universal truths about life and most especially relationships. In reality, what they discover is truth for their situations and ultimately themselves alone. The fact that Docx fails to give his characters this narrower but more realistic perspective often results in the novel's, as well as the characters', having the air of pretentiousness. Both the novel and the characters seem to take themselves much too seriously. The seeming universal scope of the presented insights begins, after much reading, to resemble a cocktail party conversation or the much-maligned self-help magazine. The pretentiousness of the characters and their insights often spills over into the prose itself. It is not unfair to say that it is, at times, overheated to the point of distraction. One wonders if a better editor or a more open relationship with the existing editor would have prevented these excesses from reaching print. It would be easy, and perhaps not inaccurate, to attribute these excesses to the authors age and lack of life experience. One often has the feeling in reading the book that the author does not have sufficient life experience with the theme being discussed and thus falls back into emotional overstatement to compensate. Another possible indication of a paucity of relevant life experience comes in the character of Nicholas. We are told the character is in his early sixties. Yet the entire psychological (not to mention physiological) portrait is more akin to a man in his eighties. One is left to conclude that the author is not really familiar with the internal psychological landscape of people over fifty. Lastly, there are more issues that good editing should have brought to light. A major character, Arkady Artamenkov, is initially presented in some depth. Yet, as the novel closes he is reduced to a prop with no exploration of his development as a result of events. We must assume that Arkady made some significant psychological adjustments off stage somewhere. In fact the entire ending of the novel seems hasty. After what has been at times painful introspection, the characters in the end reach resolution easily in a few dialogues. Was there some need to rush to what in many respects seems a formulaic ending? In conclusion, what could have been an excellent thoughtful novel by an obviously talented author is reduced to a tiring story of self-absorbed, pretentious and ultimately whiny young people. Docx needs more life experience, more humility, and better editing.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Stuff that family dramas are made of - an excellent read !,
This review is from: Self Help (Paperback)
Edward Docx's Booker longlisted novel "Self Help" has attracted strongly divided reviews. There are those - like me - who think it's a marvelous piece of work and those who hate it because they say it's long and boring. Comparisons of Docx's style with classical writers like Dickens and Dostoyevsky may be overwrought and unhelpful, though Docx's descriptive powers are certainly at their most evocative when he paints scenes of St Petersburg in words.
There's more to it than meets the eye with the Glover family. Maria's sudden passing is the trigger for the unraveling of family secrets which explain the state of tangled relationships between Nicholas and his two children Gabriel and Isabella. The existence of Akady, Maria's Russian son before her marriage to Nicholas, and his desperate search for a chance to fulfill his potential as a musician propels the plot to a cataclysmic conclusion when the two halves of Maria's family finally collide in London. Though the Glover children's troubled and unsatisfying professional and love lives take up substantial page space, it is the characters of Nicholas - their hopelessly decadent and bisexual father whom they detest and are estranged from - and of Henry Wheyland, Arkady's one true friend and sponsor - an Englishman in Russia and a desperate drug addict himself willing to sacrifice his own life in order that Arkady may have his - that take centrestage in the reader's heart and mind because they form the emotional core of the story. Though Maria's character exits no sooner than the story begins, her invisible presence - rather like Ruth Wilcox in Forster's "Howard's End" - is implied and revealed through the impact of her life on that of her children. Nicholas Glover and Henry Wheyland are my favourite characters. They are complex and multifaceted, showcasing Docx's expert craft in characterization. If there is one criticism to be made of Docx's prose, it is that he tends to get carried away with his extended non-stop stream of consciousness type chatter when writing about the feelings and thoughts of his characters (mostly Gabriel and Isabella). This can be exhausting if not downright irritating and may be one of the reasons why some readers didn't take to the book. Still, I enjoyed "Self Help" tremendously and recommend it highly to fellow readers.
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