1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beautifully Written Book, September 18, 2009
This review is from: The Weary Motel (Paperback)
This is one of the best books I've read all year. Mark Spencer is a realist, who gives us characters weighed down by their pasts, by their personal failings, by their bad choices, by their surroundings. These are people who spy on their boyfriends, respond to chain letters, cheat, drink too much, neglect their children, and otherwise live up to the "trailer-trash" stereotype in every possible way. Spencer cracks open their bleak little lives - gives us such a deep, intimate look at them that we can't help feeling their pain and, after a while, starting to root for them.
The novel largely revolves around Dill and Jo Rene, siblings and survivors of a childhood marked by TV dinners and a father who disappeared repeatedly to indulge his fetish for crippled women. Adults now, Dill and Jo Rene are still stuck in grim Adams County - a place of sordid poverty and bleak prospects. Dill owns the Weary Motel, a place frequented most commonly for its hourly rate. Jo Rene cleans the rooms. Her young daughter, Kari, has been missing for five months, kidnapped by her father, and this Jo Rene can never forget for more than an hour. Spencer brings this suffering woman to life so vividly that you can almost hear her crying in the next room. Like her brother Dill, she is a tangled confusion of good qualities and bad; perhaps the word that sums her up best is human.
The surprising thing about this book is that there is humor in it. Dark humor, but humor nonetheless. This, for me, provided a needed counterpoint to the often poignant scenes that sometimes made me think about having a cry. Spencer pulls it off flawlessly and it actually gives the book a richness that I think might be missing otherwise. The characters and plot lines are quirky enough to keep things from descending into unremitting gloom.
The ending is satisfying and, though I won't give it away, I will say that Spencer avoids cleaning things up too tidily. It's a realistic ending and, as such, in keeping with the rest of the book.
This is a good book, a memorable book, a book that is by turns funny and bitterly sad, and I recommend it wholeheartedly.
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2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Grabbing Happiness Where They Can, July 9, 2008
This review is from: The Weary Motel (Paperback)
THE WEARY MOTEL doesn't have a breakneck plot. It doesn't have lots of suspense. It's not a mystery; it's not a thriller; it's not a romance. It doesn't have a "gimmick" like some books, and it's not topical like others. It doesn't introduce us to any "brave new world." In other words, THE WEARY MOTEL is definitely not the kind of book that's going to land on anyone's bestseller list anytime soon, though it's certainly better written than most that do.
THE WEARY MOTEL takes place in the small town of Peebles, population 3,811, in southern Ohio, just southwest of Steubenville (very near the town where Clark Gable was born), near the West Virginia panhandle. It's coal-mining country, one of the least exotic places on earth. Most of the people are extremely poor, and many lives revolve around the sheer battle just to stay alive.
As would be expected, the people that inhabit this book aren't glamorous or wealthy, or involved in any exotic pursuit; they're just trying to make the best of what they've got, and along the way, maybe eke out a little happiness as well. As the novel opens, Jo Rene, a single woman approaching middle age, is setting out on a mission, a mission to spy on her live-in postman boyfriend, Buck, whom she believes, for no good reason, is lying to her and sleeping with someone on his route.
With the second paragraph, Spencer establishes the tone of his novel, and we can see this is going to be a novel that's both grim and grimly funny. Not satire. It's not biting enough for that. Not even black comedy; it's too whimsical. But, it is going to be filled with something much, much better - deep insight into what makes us human as well as raw honesty.
Spencer is an extremely talented author, one of the best and most genuine of all American voices, and while all of his writing skills are strong, it doesn't take many pages to realize that characterization and dialogue are definitely his forte. All the characters Spencer creates are "genuine," they really "come alive" on the page and they burrow into the reader's heart and stay there. Spencer's able to do what so many other, far lesser but better known authors have never mastered, i.e., translate his insight into human nature into the written word.
Spencer's characters may seem a bit quirky and offbeat at first glance, but as the book progresses, the reader comes to identify with them more and more, for what human among us isn't a bit quirky and offbeat, himself, at least at times? Spencer simply reaches deep inside his characters and turns them inside out for the reader to get to know. It is, at least in part, the loving humanity that this author bestows on each and every one of his characters that sets THE WEARY MOTEL apart and lifts it above the ordinary.
THE WEARY MOTEL features an ensemble cast, rather than focusing on one central protagonist. This book tells the story of Dill, Jo Rene's brother, and the heartache he feels over the early death of his young wife, Carol; it tells the story of Jo Rene and her struggle to survive in a family she loves and one we know that, if given a choice, she'd no doubt choose again, though she might want to kick herself for doing so; it tells the story of Dawnell, Dill's teenaged daughter and her desire to break free of the suffocating atmosphere of Peebles despite the fact that she's going to have ties to this little town for the rest of her life.
The supporting characters in THE WEARY MOTEL are as beautifully drawn and engaging as the major ones, although several of them aren't very likable, but then, they shouldn't be. There's Buck, the man Jo Rene should be woman enough to toss out, but doesn't, because love, more often than not, gets in the way of common sense and causes us to do stupid things instead of smart ones; there's Lori, Dill's unhappily married love interest; there's Tonya, the girl who dreams of running away to Florida, but settles for Buck and roses and chocolates, instead, at least for the time being. Then there're Dill and Jo Rene's mother and grandmother, two feisty women who are both surprising and yet, wholly believable.
Like the characters in Spencer's previous book, LOVE AND RERUNS IN ADAMS COUNTY, the characters in THE WEARY MOTEL do the "wrong" thing more often than they do the "right," but they are, above all else, supremely human and extraordinarily memorable. Spencer really lets us see into the hearts of these people and I found myself chuckling on almost every page and thinking, yes, that's exactly the way I felt; that's exactly the way life is.
One of the most memorable and endearing scenes occurs when Jo Rene receives a chain letter. Like most of us, her first instinct is to chuck it into the nearest trash can, but also, like most of us, Jo Rene doesn't want to tempt fate, so she deals with the letter, instead, and in a very comical and human manner.
While the characters take center stage in THE WEARY MOTEL, one really can't review this book without mentioning Spencer's fresh and funny dialogue. His narrative voice is strong and it's unique. It's also as uniquely American as Mark Twain. Spencer carefully walks the line between the comic and the grim without so much as a single misstep. In addition, his dialogue has subtext, something I think many authors today simply dismiss as being unnecessary. I have yet to read another book that can even come close to being as poignant, as truly funny, and as genuinely bittersweet as is THE WEARY MOTEL. The subject matter is sometimes dark and grim and serious, but Spencer never forgets that even in the grimmest moments there can often be found a comic side to life, and to his enormous credit, he focuses on both.
THE WEARY MOTEL is a fresh, funny, and touching novel and one I would definitely recommend to anyone. It's really too bad it's not more widely read. Mark Spencer is an author who's not only mastered his craft; he's an author who knows how to plumb the depths of the human heart.
5/5
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