Customer Reviews

The Underminer: The Best Friend Who Casually Destroys Your Life

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Mike Albo creates enough brilliant monologue material for hopeful actors to last the next 20 years. Written in the voice of "The Underminer", you will instantly know this person, despise them, and wish for their quick death. The book is short (any longer and the voice could've grown repetitive), and sweet, but it never pulls any punches. Sure it's one note, but it's a great note. Send this book as a gift to your friends. Or better yet, give it to the Underminer in your life.

After reading an excerpt in The New Yorker, I couldn't wait to get this book. It's spot-on satire--deceptively breezy (so difficult to pull off, but Albo does it perfectly), filled with passages you'll love to read out loud to your partner, but able to make you squirm as it begins to dawn that you're no slouch in the undermining category yourself.

How funny is it? I laughed out loud over and over--while in a "patient's family waiting room" waiting for a loved one to come out of surgery (he's fine). Now that's funny.

I immediately went out and got Hornito; can't wait to dive in.

By turns haunting and hilarious, The Underminer is a 164-page bitchfest as you've never experienced. Or maybe you have. . . . Every few pages, I was stifling SHRIEKS of recognition. Truly. It was if authors Albo and Heffernan had snuck a peak at my personal life, uncovering all the demons in disguise, and one in particular. . . . My absolute favorite lines: "I mean maybe you're not feeling upset because your body is in a kind of indecision about how to handle grief" and "It's just so great how yoga has spread its influence across the four corners of America. Old people are doing it, fat people are doing it, retarded people are doing it. . . ." This is the perfect book for everyone who's ever felt as if his/her so-called friends were lording their success/money/fame/real estate coups/babies over them. Buy one for yourself, and another for your nemesis. . . .

We all know at least one of them: acquaintances who seem perfectly pleasant on the outside but offhandedly make you feel awful every time you encounter them. Who ARE these people, and CAN THEY BE STOPPED?? Albo and Heffernan's hilarious book finally calls this nasty social menace by his (or her!) true name: THE UNDERMINER. This book may inspire legions to finally call such "friends" on their passive-aggressions, but THE UNDERMINER is no self-help treatus: it's a hilariouly pointed piece of social satire. I can't count the number of times I had to STOP READING THIS book because I was laughing so hard. Down with Underminers and up with THE UNDERMINER!

(A Note: Please - don't give this book one star and go off on a rant because you thought it was a self-help book, or a novel, or anything that it's not. A quick flip through the book, or even the first few pages, would show you exactly how this book was written. Maybe this would teach people not to "judge a book by its cover." Har har har.)

This book is hilarious. Each barb hits right on the nose, and makes you laugh and feel sorry for the poor victim at the same time. The whole point of the "lack of character development" is that the character could be anyone - i.e. you. The focus is exactly where it should be - on the hysterical left-handed dark humor of the Underminer.

Great, great book. If you want to laugh, and maybe (maybe?) relate, read it.

I never heard of Mike Albo before this book, and wow! He is a real talent. I was frequently overcome with laughter as I read. What is truly inspired is the way Albo nails the trends of the past 15 years. The yoga theme is a hoot, with its Hinduisms spouted by the pretentious narrator. Another blast is the conceit of Disorder, for which the cure-all is Askalar. The tones of know-it-all worldliness with which these ideas and cures are touted add to the fun. Each chapter ends with a drawing succinctly encapsulating the preceding episode, and each is a fabulous, witty entry. I don't have words to describe the fun of this book. But are people really so begrudging of others' success? Mike Albo's social circle must be green with envy at his triumph.

Completely diverting, if a bit one-note. Albo nails this character: The one-upping, passive-aggressive, self-esteem-eroding "friend," that we all recognize (even, disturbingly, in ourselves.)

The comic monologues from Albo's stage shows that have been adapted into this quasi-novel are funnier when he performs them--on stage, he gives the Underminer a motor-mouthed, shallow pathos that evens the score somewhat between him and his "loser" victim. This doesn't entirely come across in print, but the writing still rings hilariously true. This book doubles as a pretty good social/cultural history of the '90s.

I had a couple problems with it, however:

1) It's fairly static: The characters (the loquacious Underminer and his silent victim, a failure whom we only see through the Underminer's biased p-o-v) don't really evolve. They become more or less successful, briefly adapt trendy philosophies, but the Underminer doesn't seem to acquire wisdom, or undermine more deftly/softly/menacingly as time goes by.

2) After a while, the obnoxious Underminer is just not all that fun to be around. Although I kinda love that the book ends so very bleakly, the character has worn out his welcome by then.

Also, the interstitial illustrations and product parodies are a lovely idea, but they occasionally veer into a surreal humor that's at odds with the observational satire of the rest of the book.

But well worth reading...and if you get a chance to see Albo perform, seize it.

I read this book with a mixture of unease and hilarity (the same I had with watching the UK version of "The Office"). This book has comic timing in nearly every paragraph, the narrator having this relentless delivery that flows like a coffee house conversation (but manages to get jabs in there that leave the reader reeling like the poor victim). The dialogue and details of the past decade (grunge, yoga, designer handbags) do take center stage over character development, but then again - the grim joke is that the victim will never be free of the narrator.

I've heard that one of the author's strength's is where he reads this as a live monologue, and you can see that the books pacing lends itself well to performance (they pause for laughter between one liners such as "Was it you or my other friend who breaks out with Acne when they're stressed?") - but the problem is that the plot punch comes a bit too late and too quickly in the last chapter. On stage it would probably be a more powerful few minutes, but with the novella structure, it's a bit too quick and over.

Overall - it's a hilarious quick read, like an entertaining trainwreck of a life and friendship where you're truly wondering if you've been dissed for an entire decade and a half by your peers, or if you're really ok.

My cousin up in NY told me about this book, and I'm so glad he did. I got it in the mail from Amazon last week, and couldn't put it down for one second I was laughing so hard right up until the end. It's a fun and fast read, and the terrifying part is that I know this person, I mean the Underminer, she's a good friend of mine...unfortunately. It's as if Mr. Albo has been listening in to my conversations with this person. But the book also made me realize that we all have a tendency to undermine someone else, even if we don't intentionally mean it. Maybe this undermining tendency is part of our subversive human nature that Mr. Albo has finally tapped into and will make the outgoing underminers of the world think twice before commenting on their "good friends" new hairdo.

I recommend reading this book and then giving a copy to your favorite underminer. Although I guess that would be undermining them...but in a good way. for you at least.

It's half of a brilliant concept, but Albo & co. needed more of a plot than "Underminer is successful. Victim is not." Repeat ad nauseum. I'm not sure why they decided to forgo a plot, because they're clearly talented. Yes, the underminer is evil. Yes, we hate him/her. Now that you've created this character, could you please give us a catharsis already? Or some form of revenge?

After a while, it stopped being funny & just got frightening.

Still, I gave it an additional star just for this:

" I was looking for serious help and didn't realize that this was a novel and not really a self help book."

While I'm sympathetic to your situation, ma'am, these things usually say "fiction" on the back and are IN THE FICTION SECTION of bookstores, not the self-help section.

Dear Christ.