Jonathan Evison has been on my radar ever since I saw All About Lulu: A Novel in bookstores, but I just hadn't gotten around yet to reading any of his novels. After reading the Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving, though, I'll be sure to catch up with what I've been missing by reading Lulu and West of Here. Revised Fundamentals provides everything I look for in a novel - a fully fleshed out protagonist caught up in something that the author explores in both a serious and comic vein, a supporting cast of fully rounded out characters, and a writing style that lets you know you're in the hands of an author who knows how to turn a sentence and a story.
In many blurbs and reviews, Revised Fundamentals is discussed as a road novel, but the road aspects of the novel don't kick in until about halfway through. The first half of the book explores the relationship between the central character, Benjamin Benjamin, and the young man, Trev, with muscular dystrophy that he is hired to take care of. In alternating chapters we also get flashbacks to the great horror of Benjamin's life - the accidental death of his two young children, which he feels partly to blame for. There's a slow reveal of what actually happened, though you can guess early on. When you do finally get the full story, it's devastating.
To lighten that serious stuff, the author provides plenty of comic relief. It's been several years since the tragic accident, and Benjamin's wife has moved on with her life. Like most couples who experience the death of a child, they've separated and his wife has found a new man. She wants Benjamin to sign the divorce papers, and when he refuses to do so, she sics a process server on him. Benjamin's attempts to elude the server, while also dealing with a crazy neighbor in his apartment building who thinks he's feeding chocolate to her cat and killing one of her plants by dropping cigarette butts in its pot (he doesn't smoke) is very funny.
The relationship with his patient, Trev, is also terrific. Because of his illness, Trev has led a very limited life - he spends most of his days watching the weather channel, and under the watchful eye of the boy's overprotective mother, Benjamin becomes Trev's first real guy friend as they trade bawdy, sophomoric jokes about what they'd like to do to the various female weather ladies. One of their ways of bonding is to plot out oddball tourist attractions - like's the world's deepest pit - on a map.
After Trev's father, who abandoned the family when Trev was a baby, comes on the scene, the only one ready to give him any slack is Benjamin. The father, Bob, pays a fruitless visit to try to make amends to his family, but when he's turned away by his ex-wife and son, he decides to visit all the attractions his son has been mapping. But when Bob, who's comically inept at everything he does, gets into a car accident that leaves him in a leg cast, Benjamin and Trev decide to take a road trip to visit him.
The road trip is fun and full of misadventures, as Benjamin and Trev pick up an oddball cast of characters along the away - including a cute runaway Trev's age, and a young pregnant woman with an ex-con boyfriend , who's convinced he's going to strike it rich with an invention that everyone but him and his girlfriend realize is patently ridiculous.
Both storylines - the road trip and Benjamin's attempts to deal with his tragic past - come to a terrific climax that leaves you feeling the hours you spent reading about Benjamin and Trev's journeys was time very well spent.
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Top reviews from other countries
Nikkimk
Good story, characters and laughs.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 31, 2016
