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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Attitude adjustment, January 18, 2005
A young English man, who prefers to remain nameless, is filled with ennui, content to languish in his upstairs bedroom, while the world moves on without him. No member of the immediate family can reach across the emotional distance that surrounds him. During a family get-together, the young man impulsively decides to take a trip, to wander freely with no particular place in mind and no expectations. He begins by hitchhiking and accepts a ride with a philosophy-spouting truck driver, not bothering to ask his destination. Upon reaching an Eastern European country, the truck is stopped by security police; the truck driver instructs the young man to jump from the truck and run for his life. From a safe distance, he watches as the truck driver is brutally murdered.
Thus begins an existential journey in which the young man is challenged to use his wits for survival, in a dismal landscape during a punishing winter. This is a country in a constant state of emergency because of "terrorism", where people mind their own business, afraid to draw the attentions of the secret police. Cast into situations that demand a great deal of courage, the young man discovers a new appreciation for his former lifestyle and the people he left behind, desperate to escape this nightmarish paranoia, fear and incipient violence. Dropped like Alice down the rabbit hole, the young man is besieged with random brutality and ignorance, as well as the unexpected generosity of those willing to offer shelter and companionship.
The journey becomes a personal metamorphosis, an opportunity to reach his finer self, to throw off the selfishness of youth. This extraordinary plunge into the unknown, the unpredictable, speaks of the consequences of actions, shattering his ignorance in a quest for survival. Terrifying helplessness is contrasted with elegiac music and the metaphysical dialog that reaches another plane of understanding, where the familiar coexists with the unknown.
Much remains unexplained, though one could make certain assumptions. The dramatic ending is confusing, leaving me unsure if this is a Jacob's ladder conundrum or a psychological crisis. I feel somewhat ambiguous about the novel, unsure if it is significant or simply entertains aspirations without quite reaching the intended metaphysical goal. It may be a quandary that only the reader can determine. Luan Gaines/2005.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
over the top start, hard to believe middle, cliched close, February 26, 2005
One feels silly writing such a poor review on the work of someone with a resume like Nicholson, but it's hard to find much positive to say about the Society of Others, the first adult novel written by someone known for his screenplays, stage plays, and young adult. Though perhaps that's the problem, for Society reads very much like a screenplay or young adult novel, despite being otherwise intended.
The book's unnamed protagonist is a sullen, cynical young man, recently graduated from college who sits in his room all day and tries to ignore the world, whether it come in the form of his family, his girlfriend, or his economic future. The first quarter of the book introduces the character, puts him through his "world-weary" paces, and then has him use the thousand pounds gift from his writer father to "get away from it all" by hitching a ride with a trucker to an unknown destination.
The problems begin almost immediately. Though he is supposed to have graduated from college, in his speech, his sullen tone, and his cliched version of cynicism, the narrator sounds much more like a 13 year old boy brooding in his room than a 21 or 22-yr-old. His character is way over the top and while he occasionally hits some perceptive notes, they're surrounded by so much cliched and over-the-top noise that the few good notes get drowned out. And none of the dialogue in this section, mostly between the narrator and his family or his girlfriend, sounds like authentic speech. One can argue that Society has a "fable" feel to it, so perhaps it isn't intended to, but the thing about most fables is they're short; it's hard to pull off the style and tone over long periods of time--it just gets too wearying on the reader. In either case, the first 40-50 pages are a struggle to get through. The trucker whose hobby is philosophy and manages to sum up then skewer most philosophers in a single conversation can be seen as part of the fable mode or as highly contrived; in either case it didn't work for me.
The middle section of the book picks up when the trucker is let into a country that has the look and feel of the old Eastern Europe police states. Turns out the trucker is smuggling copies of an illegal book into the country. When he is discovered and violence occurs, the narrator manages to escape, left on his own in an unfamiliar, unknown country whose language he does not speak. The narrator then hooks up with a violent resistance movement, a non-violent poetry-loving resistance, a simple peasant couple trying to get by while caught between the state police and the terrorists, the state police, an absurdist television talk show host, a strange cello-playing monk with a secret identity, and a man in a grey Mercedes whom the narrator is sure has been hunting him. While the pace and sense of tension, suspense all pick up in this section, it's marred by some hard-to-believe scenes, some triteness (the peasant couple for instance), and the sense that the characters we meet are just props rather than characters. Again, one has the sense of fable here with the simplistic viewpoints, the shallow characters, the sense-of-disbelief, but it's far too extended and just doesn't seem to work.
The end focuses on his attempts to disentangle himself from the politics he's become enmeshed in and to escape the country, as he realizes that all his earlier cynicism was horribly wrong: his country, his family, his life wasn't so bad; his family loved him and he didn't do enough to return that love; life is for living; and other nice but trite sentiments. The end itself returns to fable form.
The whole book reads much more like a young adult novel (not a particularly good one) in its simplicity and obviousness of message and its mostly shallow characterization. The speedy shifts from scene to scene with little description and the changes in character that are propelled by external events (sometimes too contrived) and occur far too quickly make it feel like a screenplay. The side characters as props, the lack of names for the main character or main setting, the simplistic notions, and the close make it read like a fable, but one that should have been at most a novella, at best a long short story, rather than a 200 page book. In short, while it had a few good moments- a few times when the narrator sounded like an original, modern Holden; a few incisive comments on people or society-they were far too few and far between. Not recommended.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting, smart and in the end, a bit confusing, December 10, 2004
It's an interesting read; the philosophical musings and references to philosophers took me back to Philosophy 101 in college. It reminded me of "Crimes and Misdemeanors," the film by Woody Allen, wherein each character represents a philosopher (the blind Rabbi is Aquinus 'the eyes of god'), and this book is similar. I tried to figure out which philosopher was represented by each character, and how the interaction propelled the protagonist. The plot is fast paced and flows well. The use of poetry is not facetious; it enhances the story. I enjoyed it, although I may be admitting my ignorance by saying I didn't really "get" the ending.
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