This Book Will Save Your Life (Paperback)

~ (Author) "HE STANDS at the glass looking out..." (more)
Key Phrases: color lady, crying woman, New York, Los Angeles, Santa Monica (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

As Richard Novak is perfecting a life of isolation, a series of bizarre and surreal events force him to reassess his position and reconnect with the world around him. Upon emerging, he is bombarded with a cast of eccentric characters, including an unappreciated soccer mom, a reclusive writer and a jovial doughnut-shop owner. Throughout this darkly humorous audio, Scott Brick supplies excellent tone and subtlety, easily seducing his audience with the opening scene between Novak and a 911 operator. The contrast between the two highlights Brick's ability and range. While his vocal depictions of characters match up and remain consistent, Brick almost falters with the Novak. For the most part, Brick keeps Novak steady but occasionally delivers a speaking voice that doesn't fit the profile range delivered previously. While his uniformity on Novak wavers, his projection of the anxiety and agitation that plague Novak's life cannot be understated. This book probably won't save your life, but it's likely to make you laugh and ponder your own connection with the world.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

From The Washington Post

No, it won't. A.M. Homes's This Book Will Save Your Life can't even generate enough energy to save itself.

This tepid satire about modern America begins with Richard Novak, a wealthy day trader, having a panic attack and being rushed to the hospital with "incredible pain" all over his body: "He lay there realizing how thoroughly he'd removed himself from the world or obligations, how stupidly independent he'd become: he needed no one, knew no one, was not part of anyone's life. He'd so thoroughly removed himself from the world of dependencies and obligations, he wasn't sure he still existed."

That existential crisis could lead to great pathos or great comedy, but over the next 300 pages, Richard meanders through a series of chance encounters, reaching out with new interest and generosity to strangers who never become much more than their costumes. There's the Middle Eastern owner of a donut shop, the housewife crying in the grocery store, the handsome movie star, the reclusive '60s novelist. Richard befriends them all with low-key good cheer and somehow manages to change his life completely with about as much effort as I've expended switching shampoos.

He gives away new cars, pays for his maid's hip replacement, sends the weary housewife to a spa. "This is the person he wants to be," Homes writes. "He wants to be able to do this for others, strangers, it doesn't matter who, and he wants to be able to do it for himself." His Good Samaritan impulse also inspires a series of impromptu rescue operations: A horse is trapped in a sinkhole, a hostage is trapped in a trunk, a woman is trapped in a bad marriage. These episodes are mildly amusing (for 15 minutes, he's a national celebrity, a punch line on Letterman), but because Richard is so imperturbable and his success so firmly guaranteed, the scenes never develop any real suspense.

The larger problem, though, is the dullness of Homes's satiric edge. She portrays Los Angeles as a city collapsing -- morally and physically -- but it's Apocalypse Lite. Anyone who wants to make fun of bizarre diets, ludicrous luxuries, New Age fads and crippling exercise regimes has to stay ahead of the ever-escalating real-world grotesqueries of modern life. If you're as isolated and disconnected as Richard, you'll find the details here surprising and hilarious, but otherwise, it's yesterday's news.

Only in the last third of the novel, when Richard's 17-year-old son arrives after many years of separation, does the story make an emotional connection that doesn't seem contrived. Richard finally has a chance to save the one person he should have been concerned about from the start, but two-thirds of a novel makes for a long prologue. And when his son finally confronts him with resentments saved up through adolescence, it's a shriek of psychological pain like being awakened by a firecracker: shocking but not very illuminating.

Save yourself.

Reviewed by Ron Charles
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 372 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (April 3, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0143038745
• ISBN-13: 978-0143038740
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (39 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #80,519 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars How simple is the meaning of life?, April 24, 2006

By	Mark Mauer (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: This Book Will Save Your Life (Hardcover)

A friend who also has read this book said it was Cheever as if written by Bill Hicks: savage, funny assault on suburban life. (If he stole that line from someone else then he's now double damned.)

Still, it may not be as cynical and savage as Bill Hicks would have it. Hicks wanted LA to fall in the ocean so he could live oceanside in Arizona Bay. Though that does come close to happening here, no one is laughing manically about it. In fact, there are no villains in This Book Will Save Your Life. (At least not among the main characters). There is no one out to destroy another person to make their own life better, and there is no one who cares nothing about other people.

There is however an abundance of surreality that does not seem far removed from life in Los Angeles. The possiblity that a saber-tooth tiger is loose somewhere in the Hollywood Hills doesn't seem as far-fetched as it could, when coupled with the rest of the book's car wrecks, kidnappings, artisan donuts and kindness of strangers.

It's a book about helping other people, trying not to be selfish, and seeing what's going on around you. And despite my decription and the book's title, it's not mushy feel-goody pablum. It is not chicken soup for anyone's soul. It's a good read though.

16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good Message To Glean From The Book, May 1, 2006

By	Brett Benner (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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This review is from: This Book Will Save Your Life (Hardcover)

This chapterless marathon through one mans isolated existance in modern Los Angeles is brimming with optimism and hope. Richard Novak is a wealthy day trader living in the Hollywood Hills with a sink hole in his back yard, and a famous actor next door. When he calls 911 while experiencing what he believes is a soon to be fatal heart attack, the course of his life radically begins to change. For me, the book was almost fable like in it's telling with events transpiring that are both fantastic and nearly unbelievable. Yet the underlying message of making a simple connection with your fellow man sustains successfully without slipping into Hallmark sentimentality. On a side note, being an Angelino, the book captures the city and it's inhabitants with razor sharp precision.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perceptive, entertaining, and laugh out loud funny, August 24, 2006

By	Roni Jordan (Hanover, MA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: This Book Will Save Your Life (Hardcover)

A.M. Homes has been a favorite since "Music for Torching". She has a gift for satyrizing stereotypical characters confronted with atypical situations, while keeping it all on the precipice of believability. "This Book..." opens with Richard (don't call me Dick) Novack - divorced, middle-aged and financially free - experiencing an epiphany after a scare with a mystery illness. Richard has spent his past several years glued to his computer screen managing his investments, while his housekeeper, nutritionist, and personal trainer manage his personal needs. He is as removed from social intercourse as anyone in LA could manage to be, until the illness and an emerging sink-hole on his property change his life. A chance meeting with a woman crying in the produce department at Ralph's, the rescue of a horse from the sink-hole, a stop at an out-of-the way donut shop, a trespassing trash-picker, and a stray dog all lead to funny and lasting relationships which Richard greedily invites into his empty life. Offstage, Richard's estranged teenage son Ben is en route for a visit with the father he despises for his neglect. The book plays in your mind like the multilayered movies about LA life - Crash, Laurel Canyon, for example - and could easily be adapted to screen. But enjoy it in your mind - it's a trip worth taking.