2002 ∙ Nick Fowler ∙ 416 pgs
Trendy usually makes for bad books. They’re dated before they even come out. Authors mention name brand clothing and I’m instantly turned off. There’s no timelessness to the story–there’s only, “Oh, I remember back in 1997 when Ray Ban aviators were all the rage with the SoHo set for about five seconds!’ This book seems to suffer from this, along with the author’s interjection of what he assumes is hip, like his obvious idolization of Jeff Buckley. It seems like hardly the kind of thing on which to base a relationship. And there’s the problem… The main character has a relationship with a woman that seems to be based on the fact they enjoy a couple of the same surface likes and dislikes (including the aforementioned singer/songwriter), she breaks up with him, and he spends the rest of the story bitching about how the great love of his life is gone. It gets whiny and annoying, and the character just gets plain pathetic–not a far stretch from where he starts. Instead of the lovable loser, he’s pretty much just a loser. The author also has an annoying habit of capitalizing random words to make them stick out. It would be like me writing, “I want to tell you A Story about a couple people who are In Love.” See, how lame is that? The story goes completely haywire at the end, and I have no idea if what is written is supposed to actually be happening, is a figment of the character’s imagination, or is just some sort of post-modern bullshit that the author thought would be a funky finish to an otherwise dull book.
