Customer Reviews

What I Did Wrong: A Novel

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I'm not sure how anyone could feel the form of Weir's novel is problematic - it's discursive structure perfectly suits this tender and acerbically witty work. The narrator, Tom, (a subtle nod to Tennessee Williams, perhaps?) wrestles with the arc of his life and his choices - a neat, condensed story with a linear time frame would not only miss the point, but be a damn sight less entertaining as well. There's not a page that goes by without at least one genuine laugh, insight and heart rending insight - often all at once. Leave aside its rather prodigious poignance and intelligence (both of which steadily stream from the pages), Weir can flat out write with a command and relish few can match.

Weir is such a good writer it's a shame I didn't like this very much. He has a great eye for detail and a way with a descriptive phrase and a metaphor, but that's the problem. Way too much description. Every house on every block, every street he travels, an entire paragraph describing a car -- the endless details cover up the fact that there's not much in the way of plot, and for a non-New Yorker, a lot of the geography means nothing. And the material doesn't seem new -- a catalog of friends dying horrible slow deaths from AIDS, a best girlfriend, a hard time at school, an improbable crush on a straight kid -- I feel this has all been covered before. Zach, the dead friend who still haunts Tom, was angry and bitter and even Tom admits he didn't much like him towards the end. So why should the reader like him in the flashbacks, without knowing why they were such great friends? The straight kid is a cypher who happens to write poetry. In fact, there isn't much to Tom, either, so I really couldn't care about all the bad decisions he made, and toward the end I was committing the ultimate sign of boredom -- I started skimming. There were some funny moments and some witty dialog, but I really wanted to just shake Tom and tell him to stop living in the past and get get a life. If you relish the beauty of a well-crafted sentence, you'll enjoy this book. If you expect a novel to have a story that involves you, I wouldn't recommend it.

Yo, it's me John Weir. I wrote this book! It's true. My mother told me never to respond to critics - she meant my 6th grade gym class - but, whatever, I can't stop myself, and so I just want to ask: What's all this about my novel, *What I Did Wrong*, not having a plot? Or "much of a plot?" For one thing, it has a lot of plots. Somebody dies, somebody has sex in a doorway, somebody gets a job in Queens, somebody boxes naked with his high school best friend: Is that not enough action for you?

Second of all, who says plots have to be all about physical action in the world? Can't plots also have to do with a character reflecting on his or her life and seeing connections between and among events - learning what her or his life has been about, in other words? Does it always have to be, like, "And in the end it turned out that Rosebud was his sled?" Or, you know, "Guess what? Bruce Willis is dead!" Alfred Hitchcock himself admitted that a plot was a kind of giant false lead that mattered very little in terms of the overall arc of the story. Ever see Hitchcock's *The 39 Steps*? The big mystery is, Who killed the overdressed German lady who picks up Robert Donat at a magic show? That's the ostensible plot. And: What are the 39 steps? Watching the movie, though, you realize pretty quickly that Hitchcock couldn't really care less about murderers and mysteries. Mostly, he wants to show you how a man and a woman who hate each other get handcuffed together and end up sharing a bed and then falling in love. It's kind of a (very) soft-core porno film in the middle of this supposed mystery. Really, it's Hitchcock's wet dream - being handcuffed to a pretty blonde! What does big old Alfred care about "plot?" It's a device put there in order to let us have our sex guilt-free, a roll-in-the-hay in the guise of a "plot."

And, I mean, "plot?" There must be a *plot?* What about the whole history of 20th century art? Ever see a movie by Michelangelo Antonioni? *L'Avventura*! A bunch of rich Italians get on a boat and lie around in early '60s swimwear until one of them disappears. They dock alongside a craggy island and search for her for a while, but, whatever, sooner or later they sort of give up, they never find her, and, in any case, wouldn't you rather watch Monica Vitti wander around Sicily in sleeveless tailored sack dresses than search for someone you hardly know on a cold and rainy island? The movie lets go of its big plot point really early on, just drifts away from it, and then you're free to forget about plot and think about more important stuff, like, "Why are these people so unhappy?" Or, "What's happening under the surface of their everyday ordinary lives?" Or, "Who knew Sicily had so many big empty town squares?" Or, "If you were Monica Vitti, would you sleep with *that* guy?"

Antonioni's movies tease you with plot and then wander away from it. It's deliberate: Once you're denied the traditional conventions of "plot," you're forced to re-think the mechanics of cause-effect, and to concentrate instead, and way more acutely than you normally would, on stuff like landscape, and gesture, and image, and the passage of time.

"Plot," in other words, has been proven long ago to be a variable component of narrative, not a necessary one. The plot of *my* book is hooked to external events, but also to internal ones, and I think the novel's movement is mostly about how people deal with trauma, how trauma disorients us, how it interferes with our own personal day-to-day narratives; how feelings of traumatic loss tend to rupture the linear flow of events; how your whole life can sometimes seem to be happening in an instant. To other people, you appear to be moving through your day, but in fact you're stuck in your head reliving a jumble of moments and events that may or may not add up to who you are right now, or ever were, or want to be.

Okay, and here's another question: Who wants to "identify" with a book? You know, because, I mean, some people are all, "I didn't like that book because I couldn't identify with the characters." Or, "Well, I just didn't see myself reflected in it anywhere. It was not about me." And, all right, I'm as egotistical as the next guy, but: I like to read books that are not *at all* about me. I would rather *not* identify with a novel's characters. Isn't it more fun when a work of art doesn't reflect your experience in any way? Not that I'm calling my book a work of art. Just: What is this notion that every artwork has to "include" us? Isn't that kind of limiting? Do we all have to be spoonfed happy images of ourselves in order to enjoy a novel? The novels I cherish most are books that challenge, frustrate, even appall me. I wouldn't like to think I'm anything like aging, raging-and-marauding Mickey Sabbath in Philip Roth's *Sabbath's Theater*, but it's a beautiful book, spectacularly well-written, all the moreso because it shows you an irresistible character who, in real life, you'd maybe spit on, or cross the street to avoid, or turn over to the police.

I don't think of novels as self-help manuals. I don't get upset when they show me the landscape of places I have never been, or the personalities of people I hope I will never be. I'm not saying anybody has to like my book, but I sometimes wish people would be more thoughtful about the reasons they maybe *don't* like it.

Okay, I'm crabby, Mercury is retrograde, I'll regret writing this in the morning, forgive me, my mother was right, I don't know anything, and, in any case, thanks for buying my book.

Very sincerely,

John Weir.

Tom, the main protagonist in John Weir's eloquent What I Did Wrong, proves that memory and recollection is a powerful force. Moving through almost thirty years of his life, Tom recounts his often-painful experiences growing up different in suburban Jersey. Picked on by the world around him, Tom was seen as a sissy, pushed and punched for being effeminate, his first public beating coming when he was 11 years old and he never once cried or complained.

From an early age, Tom realizes that he will never be able to deliver the masculine ideal, damaged by his own natural inclinations, continuously tortured by school yard bullies, he grows older thinking it was him that did wrong. We first meet Tom at forty-two. He's now working in Queens teaching English literature to undergraduates, and has just fallen in love with Justin, one of his students.

It's been six years since his best friend Zack died of AIDS, and finally Tom is able to let someone get inside of him again, "past the blood brain barrier." Justin is a sensitive "boy poet" who tells Tom that he "wants to be surrounded by literature just like you," Whilst Tom throws caution to the wind, letting his feelings run away from him, attracted to Justin's broad shoulders and surprisingly small hands.

Tom decides to confide all this to his old childhood friend Ritchie. School buddies, they've known each other for more than twenty-five years, sometimes close and sometimes distant, it was Ritche that provided Tom with solace at school during the worst of the harassment, the only person who took the time to address Tom's particular dilemma - how does one become more of a man while growing up in such a mannish and truculent world?

Of course, life never works out the way you want it to. Tom grows older, moves to New York, and encounters a city with it's glittering towers and its hard, gold light, and its promises that life consists primarily of losing things. After all, this is the early eighties, and the age of AIDS and as Tom comes out, his rite-of-passage into adult hood is riddled with anxiety.

Tom watches Zak orchestrating his death from almost the minute they meet, diagnosed with AIDS in 1989; Zack is Tom's "first raging angry queer." A self-proclaimed professional author, Zack "takes over the plot" and Tom makes him "the star of his life," as Tom steadily watches the dying Zak being eating away by this terrible disease.

Zak's eventual death is heart wrenching, and while he dies enraged with a form of terrible and special narcissism, Tom is finally cut loose, the fantasy of losing him "more beautiful than anything we have done in life." Tom's just an average guy whose friend had died, but nothing he had learned in the last thirty-five years had prepared him for this.

Author John Weir has spun is a complicated and intricate morality tale that deals with the important themes of growing up as an outsider and the critical choices that can confront a middle-aged g*y man, tormented by grief and loss and sexual longing. The only way Tom can really be happy and quell his middle-aged rage is by coming to terms with his tormented past.

In the drama of Tom's young life, he is vexed to climax by being tortured by the torturing boys, caught in a web of masculinity, "in which our dads are twisting our arms, offering love and abuse." In middle age, he's overwhelmed by a passion he can't realistically have, yet his love for Justin continually forces him to confront the men, the manly ghosts of his childhood, the mythical fathers and sons showing off their strength or crying in one another's arms.

In beautiful prose, Weir perfectly conveys Tom's confusion and anger and eventual recognition of a condemnatory world in which he must escape. Gradually, Tom does indeed forge a new life for himself in New York, however much of a struggle it may be. It's a life that is a mixture of pain, and tragedy, and the always-present romantic anticipation, that is sometimes serene and even hectic with desire. Mike Leonard June 06.

That's how I--and most people I know--judge novels these days: With all the other demands on my time, did I gain something from the time I spent with these characters and this writer? In this case, the answer is an unqualified "yes."

Full disclosure first: I was one of John Weir's graduate students and feel that his guidance has made an overwhelmingly positive difference in my writing. That said, I didn't agree with everything he said, nor did I make every revision he suggested. He always judged my writing professionally and honestly, and I wouldn't insult him by doing less.

There's not a tremendous reliance on plot in this novel--college professor Tom and various friends and acquaintances spend a strange day together while Tom reminisces about his past. But there are many stories--some of them laugh-out-loud funny, some so sad they're hard to read, some so strange that they must be based on real experiences--and in those stories are some very bold statements. The one that resonates most strongly for me: The idea that so many of us, approaching middle age or already there, are still trying to figure out what we're doing with our lives; that is, although we're functioning and earning money and doing things that are reasonably productive, we still don't necessarily know why, and it still doesn't necessarily feel good.

As you read, take the time to enjoy the descriptions of the various settings, not only the places throughout NYC but the individual apartments and offices and bars. Like so many of the great Southern writers, John has turned these places into supplemental characters, and some of my biggest laughs came from this (I thought the staff at Starbucks was going to call the men in white coats on me a couple of times). You'll definitely laugh more than you'll feel weepy, in large part due to John's ability to infuse even the saddest moments with dry humor--just like real life.

All that said, I didn't think this was a perfect novel. My middle-aged attention span had some trouble with the structure and I found myself confused a couple of times during the flashback sequences. If this is a tendency you have as a reader, stopping only at the ends of chapters should take care of it. And I might have spent more time with the relationship between Tom and Justin, and less time at the bar.

My conclusion: Buy the book--it's really inexpensive here--and don't expect a beach-read. Do expect a thought-provoking journey.

fluid and funny and charming -- and smart about who we are and how we get there. I loved this book!

the structure felt completely natural to me, like thinking

I was expecting great things from John Weir's "What I Did Wrong," having been a fan of his first novel, published in 1989; I didn't imagine, however, the novel would be even more powerful and affecting than I had anticipated. It is, quite simply, the strongest recounting of the experience of AIDS in the lives of urban gay men that I've read since Allen Barnett's masterful "The Body and Its Dangers." Moreover, Weir's handling of time--the novel's intelligent and restless movements between present and past, between what is still here and what is gone--is at once bold and entirely assured. This is the novel that I'll be pressing upon all of my friends this year.

Lyrical in its Whitmanesque trips down the LIE, across Queens; tragic in that the main character carries personal tragedies to every moment he experiences in the single day that the novel comprises; flashback after flashback, but seamless. And somehow, the novel and its narrator have nothing but respect -- and sometimes admiration -- for bridge-and-tunnel kids who think they're writers.

I forget where I'd first heard of "What I Did Wrong", but it sounded interesting enough to buy from one of the Amazon resellers. The book is basically a stream of consciousness, day in the life of a Queens College English professor (h/t to James Joyce, who receives a passing mention). By revolving around a single day, the story encompasses many years of the narrator's life and his interactions with the other principals. The characters are fairly stock with varying degrees of development and divergence from type. Like many gay lit protagonists, the narrator is a sensitive boy who was called a "fag" and taunted/beat up by everyone through school. He's also the gay guy who has always fallen for straight guys. Fortunately, his life also has had fairly typical elements for someone who came of age in the 70s and majored in the liberal arts (dope smoking and road trips in high school, underemployment for years after completing a liberal arts degree) and the story doesn't get lost in the usual cliches about sensitive boys. The other characters are past or present obsessions in his life--Richie, his straight friend from high school (the cool best friend who brightened his world then, but is as unevolved as him now and darkens his current life); Justin, the straight student who elicits lust from him now; Zack, his now dead (from AIDS) love of his life, and in a smaller role, Ava, the pan sexual, semi-girlfriend who also had a strong bond with Zack. Richie is a familiar type from life and fiction---the guy who was cool and likable as an adolescent, but unfortunately has kept the same level of emotional development as a 40 year old. The narrator tries to sell Justin to us as the kind of kid who used to beat up on him, but mostly he seems like a downmarket version of a familiar kind of liberal arts major---someone who listens to indie rock, writes poetry, and is involved with girl who annoys everyone around her. DC is full of more privileged version of Justin and I often see them being nagged by their girlfriends or patiently listening as the girlfriend complains about everyone else in their lives. Zack is the angry New Yorker and reminded me of a grad school classmate of mine who was dying of a different deadly disease--he, too, had a sharp tongue and lacerating wit that somehow drew people to him rather than driving them away. Ava is probably the most interesting character because she is a bit less of a type--the narrator sees her as someone who would make a great male friend, a description which seems incomplete. She also seems to lack the pettiness and jealousies that are common to males, gay or straight.

It becomes apparent that the narrator avoided AIDS because his sex life has mostly existed in his fantasies. Indeed, his sexuality still seems mostly in his head and probably explains why he hasn't evolved much from his adolescent worship of Richie. Late in the book, it's revealed why he drifted away from Richie and, ironically, it was because Richie tried to get him to move beyond himself. By choosing an academic and a college setting, Wier has picked an environment that rarely sparks excitement and the ruminations of a prof whose stuck in his own head aren't exactly pieces with wide appeal (if anything they particularly lack appeal for some people who happily left world behind). The narrator's ethical shortcomings, if anything, make him less sympathetic even though he acknowledges what is wrong.

The book held my interest well enough to see it through, but there was a lot that could have been improved with some assertive editing. . The ending is a bit too predictable and ties things together a bit too neatly. It does this by showing how the narrator fails to "grow" from his experience, but the same thing could have been accomplished without resorting to an ending that is more neatly constructed than the rest of the book. The prose lapses back in forth from the present day or very recent past to the distant past, and the narrator's relationship with Zack. Often the switches seem arbitrary and the transitions are, at best, a little abstract in their purpose. The book would have benefits from more backstory and development of most of the characters--Richie is too much of a cliche and it would help to have some novel way of explaining how he's remained that way. There are inklings, toward the end, that there is more to him than has met the eye (esp. in the past), but more of this sort of thing would have made him a stringer character. Much the same could be said about Justin, who starts as one stereotype and evolves into another. Certainly not a bad book, but not one to put at the top of your list.

Maybe it's a problem with first person narratives that are dangerously close to memoir, but I find novels like this tend to have under-developed or under-examined narrators. Maybe the author understands the narrator so well in his own mind, he forgets to convey that understanding clearly to the reader. Or he doesn't see himself clearly enough, warts and all, because he hasn't wrestled with his own demons?

I found the character of Tom rather nebulous. He always seemed to react to others rather than be the agent of action. Apart from his effeminate demeanor ad tortured alienation as a bullied gay teenager, I never got a sense of what the Tom was really like, especially as an adult (besides being fat, balding, a late sleeper, and possessing an annoying penchant for associating every event or scene with a pop culture or highbrow literary allusion). As a reader, I wanted to get a better sense of how Tom conducted his life as an adult, how his unexplained relationship with his mother affected him (she abandoned him after his utter humiliation at the school play to go attend a dog show???), what he did with his time besides teach, who his friends were, etc.. Was he still lonely at this point? Or did all of his gay friends die from AIDS? What were his quirks, his dreams, his peeves? Besides his obsession with trying to make sense of Zack's death and its meaning for him, he's kind of inscrutable.

On the other hand, Weir fleshes out the rest of the characters in his novel with great skill, from the protective charmer Richie, to acerbic narcissist Zack, socially adroit free-spirit Ava, and the guileless poet-in-thug's-clothing Justin. The dialogue is wonderful when these characters are in conversation. Weir has a great ear for catching the speech habits that make the characters come alive and seem distinct.

As far as plot is concerned, I agree with those (including the author in his letter of defense) who realize that a whole lifetime of memories and fears and regrets can play out in a person's mind over the course of a single day, or even in a few minutes if the right triggers are there. Think of Virginia Woolf's writing. There's nothing wrong with such internal narratives. I think many people are hung up on plot because they're too used to the narrative flow of films and television. Literary novels have the advantage of capturing timeless or atemporal reality in ways those media do not.

Lastly, I loved the author's wise insights and witty reflections throughout the novel. Usually I don't mark up a novel as I read it, but I had to highlight several passages in this one.