Customer Reviews

Uncle Max

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

 

 

I must get something off my chest...I'm so fed up with critics who dismiss books simply because they aren't "serious" fiction. If a book is fun to read, they write it off as fluff or catagorize it as a good "beach read". Just how many dreary coming out stories and AIDS novels does a gay boy have to read anyway? I really enjoyed this book. It was fun to read, imagine that! If you enjoyed Can't Buy Me Love, then you'll like Uncle Max. Both books share the theme of wacky scheming that gets the lead characters into lots of trouble. The uncle Max of the title is like a gay male version of Auntie Mame, but with a darker edge. Max spends the summer teaching his nephew the finer points of rock climbing, shoplifting, Balzac, and burglery. It didn't end quite like I expected, but life doesn't always go acording to plan, I learned that from uncle Max.

Before I say anything about this fine book which really earned my five stars, I have to express one complaint about the publisher and the dust jacket illustrator. Both should have read the book before plopping an illustration on the cover, which not only has nothing to with the book's theme but also creates an entirely different impression of what the book is about.

In other words, it is not the totally "FAB" gay summer romp the jacket suggests. Instead, it tells the coming out story of fourteen-year old Dillion who happens to be named for the lake where by accident he was conceived. A product of a multiply broken home, an alcoholic abusive mother, a junior high school system out to get him, and his own budding sexual inclinations, Dillion seems to be heading toward depression and alcoholism (and/or bible camp and military school) all on his own.

Just when everything looks as bleak as possible, Uncle Max (black sheep, ex-con, and would be Fagan) appears in the wine cellar to save the day (?) for Dillion. He then proceeds to introduce him to shoplifting, Balzac, cat burglary, mountain (and wall) climbing and eventually life itself.

Fortunately, Kenry's witty and expert story telling skills save the book from being as depressing as it might sound. Uncle Max is a hard character to love - you want to, but he's so ... self-indulgently Uncle Max. Dillion, on the other hand, you can't help but love. You know that no matter how the book ends, he'll find some way to be a winner.

While UNCLE MAX is a notch below Chris Kenry's outstanding first book CAN'T BUY ME LOVE, it still is very enjoyable reading, and I recommend it to you all.

Before I begin actually reviewing this book, I have a confession to make. I just finished a search on the rest of Mr. Chris Kenry's work. I would honestly read (With out being paid or commanded by the people that cut my pay check) another of his books. To read a book a few years after it was released, and see that the author hasn't fallen off the face of the earth is exciting. If I enjoyed this book that was written in 2002, imagine how great at his craft he as become in the subsequent years.

"Uncle Max" is a tricky book. Like the guy that says he wants a relationship but is actually only after a one night stand, the book poses to be one thing and actually is another. "Uncle Max" unabashedly bills itself as a comedy. It wants you to believe you're supposed to read it under a glorious beach umbrella while your friends play football on the beach spanning in front of you. It wants you to believe you're supposed to read little paragraphs from it to your friends over lunch so you can all comment on how witty it is. Let remind you that this is what the book WANTS you to believe.

This "fluff" perspective the book has of itself is very limiting. Sure, parts of Dillon's story about the end of his adolescence and his entrance into adulthood are humorous, but not in the casual beach manner the book wants you to think. It's a very black humor, as we are supposed to find most of the humor in his interactions with his alcoholic, newly religious mother and his criminal, pedophile uncle. (Insert laughter here.)

Dillon's life, for a 14 year old, is about on par with the normal dysfunction the average American family seems to attract these days. His mother decides, after two failed marriages and years of massive anger displacement towards Dillon, to "discover" religion and give up alcohol. Just as Dillon is preparing for his baptism and all the religious glory that comes with it, he finds the alcohol his mother left behind. One thing leads to another, and his ever loving mom decides the best thing to do with the problem child is to send him away to a Nazi-err...Church Camp. Enter Uncle Max.

Instead of getting a fairy godmother interjecting and fixing his life, Dillon gets Max. A former drug dealer and convict, Max will seduce anything that gets in his way. Man. Woman. Nephew. Whatever it takes. A real go-getter, it's not long before Max seduces Dillon into a web of crime and deception. In the end, we are left alone with Dillon and a mountain of question marks, BEGGING for a sequel.

Chris Kenry's characters reminded me of Mr. Chuck Palahniuk's characters ("Fight Club," "Invisible Monsters"), and I mean that in the most complimentary way. There was never a moment in all of the character's misadventures where they acknowledged that they were horrible people doing horrible things. Aside from Dillon's 14-year-old flexible sense of right and wrong, none of the supporting cast has a sense of morality. Everyone has their share of flaws, and everyone follows the rules of living in a glass house. No one wants to throw the stone that sends the glass house tumbling down.

So, we have mayhem. Robbery. Incest. Religion. Alcoholism. A virtual how-to guide for shoplifters. Drugs. Divorce. Insurance fraud. A cast of characters that marvel in their wicked smuttiness. Not to mention the coming of age story that glues all these themes together.

Yep, it's clearly the perfect book for your casual day at the beach.

Fortunately for me, morality bores me. I hope the rest of your work mirrors this one Mr. Kenry. If so, you have a fan.

The basic plot is that of a gangly, nerdy, kid named Dillion in his early teens who fails to fit in anywhere only in part to being gay. The uncle he never knew shows up (on parole which he violates immediately and consistently) and precedes to entrap the kid into all kinds of burglaries and other crimes. The kid winds up falling in love with his Uncle Max. Max is basically a psychopath who uses people. There is a lot of evidence that he cares a lot about the kid, but not a lot of care. There is one scene in which Max molests (statutarily rapes) Dillion and another scene in wich another character confesses to repeated acts of child sexual abuse that the reader ought to be warned about. Kenry's excellent sense of humor makes for great narration and dialouge but there is very little that one could call basic morality let alone justice in the plot.

I bought Can't Buy Me Love (the authors first book) one day when I was browsing, looking for something different and fun to read, and I enjoyed every minute of it. So I didn't think twice when Uncle Max came out. I shelled out the money for the hardcover--and I wasn't disappointed. It was funny, poignant and even heartbreaking in places for what Uncle Max, Dillon and even Dillon's mother went through. At this rate Chris Kenry is going to be one of the few authors I actually will keep buying (even at -groan- hardcover prices). I'm looking forward to the next.

First of all, can you sue a publisher for using a misleading cover? I guess not, but I kept wondering as I neared the end when those two cute guys were going to arrive at Dil's door the way they are on the cover. They didn't show. There aren't any cute guys here. There are just a bunch of despicable adults.

This novel starts out very funny, with lots of accurate detail about Dil's painful experiences as the geeky awkward kid tormented in junior high school. But then he starts enumerating his many troubles. Things just go from bad to worse for him. And then the title character appears, his Uncle Max, who teaches him a lot of things about life and survival, but these are things Dil shouldn't learn. The book just keeps getting darker. I enjoyed the way the plots of several Balzac novels are worked into Dil's life. But I did not enjoy what happens to various major characters during the final chapters.

As with so many new novels, this one could have used a proofreader. We get the usual mistakes involving "it's," "principle," and "shoe-in." But the whole Balzac theme and subplot make up for the errors. This is not at all what I expected (I wanted cotton candy and got castor oil instead), and I'm still wondering who the two cute guys on the cover are and where they are because they're sure not in this book.

Chris Kenry continues to create the best current genre fiction this reader has encountered. Why? Well, it has all to do with his natural gift as a story teller and very little to do with any misguided and irrelevant judgments based on the presumed morality of his characters. Like his acknowledged literary mentor Balzac, and in a more familiar vein Charles Dickens, he invents rogues and proceeds to humanize them.

Uncle Max is no exception. This largely unloveable creature is a textbook case out of the DSM, cast as a foil for the teenage narrator Dillon. Plotted as a sort of coming-of-age tale over the course of one summer, a collection of bizarre yet fundamentally realistic episodes carry the reader once again (as in last year's Can't Buy Me Love) into the Denver demimonde with which the author is intimately connected.

The young Dillon has to deal with all the usual teenage problems of angst and rejection during his seminal summer of growing up. Worse yet, everyone around him is dysfunctional. The fact that he endures it all and keeps his wits together is the heart of this ostensibly immoral morality tale. Lust, crime, infidelity, heartbreak? Sure, it's all there -- but what a lesson!

For the reader who gets carried away with cover art and figuratively takes this book to the beach, disappointment lurks. For Kenry is essentially a serious rather than a comic or pornographic writer, whose talents have only begun to emerge as he experiments with classic themes in the guise of "gay" fiction.

This reader looks forward avidly to not only more stories in the same vein, but further adventures of the naughty but nice Uncle Max as well.

"'Uncle Max' is the story of a gawky adolescent teetering on the edge of homosexuality, who discovers an unlikely hero in his outrageous, irreverent uncle. Together, this daring duo embarks on a glorious madcap adventure that will change young Dillon's life forever."--© zebraz

A surprisingly interesting read. i was looking for air head read and i got something that was more than just subway material to pass the time. however it was way too short, i demand a sequel, Dil needs to go looking Max! Yes indeed!

After Can't buy me love this was the second novel by Chris Kenry that I read. It's very well-written, funny but it has some definite dark undercurrents too. And as with the first book, the image on the cover doesn't do this novel justice at all. Can somebody please have a word with the art department at Kensington Publishing so in future this won't happen again? One more negative: the story ends way too soon. So dear, DEAR Mr. Kenry, will you please consider writing a sequel? Maybe call it Max & the City of St. Tropez? ;-))