The Year of Endless Sorrows: A Novel (Paperback)

~ (Author) "WE'RE FROM THE MIDWEST MOSTLY..." (more)
Key Phrases: acute knee pain, westbound buses, navy peacoat, New York, East Village, First Avenue (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

It's the early '90s, and an unnamed Midwestern aspiring writer, recently graduated, moves into an East Village apartment with three roommates: his actor younger brother, Feick (promptly swept out of his life by artistic success); his best friend, Glenwood (a skinny, self-loathing Columbia Business School student); and Burton Loach, a vagrant type just as happy to watch the fan blades as TV. The narrator's superiors at Van Von Donnell Publishing (where he has a pittance-paying, bottom-rung job) are waspy, shallow, depraved, and smugly articulate. In short chapters, YA novelist (Under the Wolf, Under the Dog) and playwright (Red Light Winter) Rapp lets the office satire rip, particularly of the boss with a predilection for farting (who takes a shine to him as prospective son-in-law material) and the children's book illustrator who delivers personalized erotic portraits on napkins to co-workers. In between novel writing, calls home to his frenzied mother and attractions to Ivy League office girls (as well as the physically flawless but destructive boss's daughter), he falls for aspiring actress Basha, a Polish émigré he has seen twice on the subway platform before running into her a third fateful time. This sweet, stagy bildungsroman never departs familiar territory, but it has lots of winning set pieces. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Some authors are inclined to use similes and metaphors as liberally as if they were salt and pepper and the blank page a plate of bland, boiled chicken. Thankfully, Rapp's literary comparisons are so imaginative that they don't overwhelm the palate. His story is set in New York during the early 1990s, and the unnamed narrator is a young man recently graduated from both college and an uneventful life in the Midwest. Despite the recession and his mother's disapproval, he lands a slave-wage job at a publishing house in Manhattan and immediately starts work on a novel about "acute knee pain and the end of the world." So begins our hero's life as a starving artist, and his misadventures include moving into a bombed-out apartment (replete with roaches), along with three other unhygienic males; sleeping with his crazy boss' daughter; and nearly killing the publishing house's executive editor with a champagne cork. If all this sounds somewhat pedestrian, that's because it is, but Rapp's inspired prose and comic set pieces add so much flavor to this entree that readers will be left hungry for more. Jerry Eberle
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (December 26, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374293430
• ISBN-13: 978-0374293437
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #619,496 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Trying very, very hard..., February 18, 2007

By	M. Farley (Brooklyn NY) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I am 100 pages into this book and I'm not going to finish.

I cannot take the egregiously excessive use of similes and metaphors. Similes mostly. An average of FOUR per page. The classic example of a writer trying to show you how witty he is. Had the plot moved beyond description in the first 100 pages, I might have stuck with it. But I just found it too irritating to read.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars UGH, March 23, 2007

By	Lori Machens "Lorimach" (New York, NY) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I wasn't crazy about this book from the beginning, but I hung in there, hoping it would get better.

It didn't.

Rapp is so enamored with telling his "interesting" little side-notes and sharing his "insightful" musings of the East Village that he forgets that there should probably be a story in there somewhere. But this only sort of materializes in the last third of the book, and by then you don't care at all for his annoying, ridiculous characters.

A total letdown.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Mediocre, October 22, 2007

By	Book Dork (Southern California) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

In order for a novel to be deemed "good" in my eyes it must possess a strength in at least one area. Perhaps the writing is extremely strong while the plot is so-so. Or vice-versa; an exceptional plot and less than perfect writing. Even more pleasing is when success is achieved in both areas. Adam Rapp's The Year of Endless Sorrows fails to fall into any of those categories; neither the story itself or the actual prose reach out and grabs the reader (over four hundred pages of not being sucked in!).

Rapp tells the story of a young man starting out in New York City right after college; he must cope with eccentric roommates, a difficult job market, family struggles and dating dilemmas- all done many times before and done better.

It's not a difficult read by any means; much better than half of the New York Times Bestsellers, so you could do much worse than reading this novel. Then again, you could do much better...