Recommend: No.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cLast week on the \u2018Staff Recommends\u2019 shelf was a copy of a book that Bert C. reviewed. He said everyone had to read it. It\u2019s no longer there so I was hoping you could let me know what that book was.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cDo you remember any other details,\u201d the fair-haired Town Hall Dymocks elf says, politely, if not a little tiredly. She eyes the clock on the service desk computer. It is nearly 7pm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt was around 300-pages. It was quite a wide book. I am usually dubious of 300-page books these days. But he did say on the flash card that everyone should read it.\u201d
\u201cBert C. says that about a lot of books.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I pause. The Town Hall Dymocks elf is trying to tell me something. Without telling me not to buy a book. It\u2019s not something I am ready to hear though.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few days later, an email from Bert C.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAnyone\u2019s Ghost by August Thompson.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019ll start this review in an unconventional place: the acknowledgements, which drone over four pages. August Thompson begins with thanks to his high school teachers, \u201cwho made several hours a day of high school a time of grace and charisma instead of emo angst\u201d<\/em>. It\u2019s all a bit cringe. And yet as the acknowledgments drag on, I am dumbfounded. The names that appear here are incredible: Jonathan Safran Foer, Joyce Carol Oates, Jeffery Eugenides, Katie Kitamura, Brandon Taylor. How insane to thank the high school teacher Mr. Denis and Katie Kitamura in the same breath. All these world-renowned writers (and Mr. Denis) gave feedback on this novel and all we ended up with was this overwrought, self-conscious, sprawling mess of a love story?<\/p>\n\n\n\n The plot of Anyone\u2019s Ghost is exceptionally simple, seemingly made more complex by the splitting of the novel into three parts:<\/p>\n\n\n\n I am furious at this novel because if you are going to write such a simple plot over 300 pages, you must be skilled at writing. You must introduce tension somehow, or at the very least have the characters be vaguely empathetic. Instead, we just get 300 pages of drivel. The narrator\u2019s most interesting property is that his name, Theron, reminds me of the Game of Thrones character Theon. The love-interest, Jake, is the dullest depressive I\u2019ve ever met in literature. I cared more about the updates to my health insurance premiums than I did whether he was gay or not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Anyone\u2019s Ghost<\/em> suffers from the same devil-may-care American writing style as Jackie Ess\u2019s Darryl<\/em>. There\u2019s all this \u201coh man\u201d and \u201cah fuck\u201d in the dialogue. There are road trips pined after and meals whittled away at crappy food chains. It\u2019s a rush when Bret Easton Ellis references The National\u2019s lyrics in passing in a scene in Imperial Bedrooms (\u201cone time you were blowing young ruffians”)<\/em>. When August Thompson takes an entire song title (Anyone\u2019s Ghost) from The National as his own, it is lame and uninspired. All this Americana in August Thompson\u2019s novel just feels like filler \u2013 it\u2019s a lazy way to try and evoke a time and place and push up the word to 300 pages. This novel is much more Dear Evan Hansen than it is BEE.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are other major gripes I have with this book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My primary issue is the writing. August Thompson sucks at it. He tries to be poetic and poignant throughout the whole novel and it falls flat every single time. He chucks a bunch of metaphors at the wall, hoping some stick, but none are fleshed out so they just look out of place and awkward. Take this line as an example: \u201cThe beach still clung to sunlight<\/em>\u201d. It\u2019s sort of a nice visual and \u201cclung\u201d is an interesting verb choice. But there\u2019s no deeper meaning there and no attempt to add layers to the atmosphere \u2013 the next sentence will be completely unrelated; the characters will probably be back in the car and talking shit about metal music. This is a structural problem with his writing. The metaphors he uses could be evocative in the hands of better writers (Jonathan Safran Foer, Joyce Carol Oates, Jeffery Eugenides, Katie Kitamura, Brandon Taylor) but Thompson doesn\u2019t wrap the imagery up with a purpose, so the purple prose just sits there alone on the page, spoiling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On a related note, the dialogue is terrible. Here\u2019s the narrator\u2019s father having a D&M, made for a straight-to-streaming service.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt\u2019s all right, Davey. It really is. I trust you. You\u2019re not a fuck up. It\u2019s silly \u2013 one of the worst parts of getting old is you forget what it was like being a kid. You lose your sense of empathy, even though you promise yourself you never will. Even when you spend your whole life thinking you\u2019ll never be like your parents, you end up forgetting. I know I can be a real asshole now, but there was a time where I was fun. People loved having me around.\u201d He sighed.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Sigh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some more pithy wisdom from Dad, saved up for the end of Part One.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cYou don\u2019t need to be that way. It\u2019s OK to care. No, it\u2019s good to care. It gets harder as you get older, so I hope you\u2019ll do as much caring as you can now. Just giving a shit is enough sometimes.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Oh, and here is some dialogue between the narrator and his teenage boy crush. I\u2019ve experienced more tension during a game of monopoly with my family.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI want to be here, right here, for a day that feels like a year.\u201d \u201cOh shit, you\u2019re gettin\u2019 deep on me.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s less annoying but there\u2019s also a weird tendency for the narrator to talk about how he grew up only among women, even though for 200 pages there are no prominent female characters whatsoever. It\u2019s a strange flex, and it comes up multiple times in the book (\u201cA life without women was a stark change. Growing up, my favourite thing was when my mother filled our house with women.\u201d)<\/em>. Is August Thompson guilty about the lack of gender representation in his novel? Is he insinuating spending a lot of time with women as a child made his narrator gay? It\u2019s off-putting, if I am being honest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is just so obviously a bad book. The plot is bland. The writing inexcusable. The characters are paper-thin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bert C. you owe me $35.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" And inside of these moments, where hope emerged over the chop and crest of self loathing, I thought he loved me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":983,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews_books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=978"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/978\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":982,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/978\/revisions\/982"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/983"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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I thought about what to say, and it all felt clich\u00e9, but sometimes all we can turn to are cliches. \u201cI wish you could too. But it\u2019s good to leave a place before you get sick of it, you know? It\u2019s good to miss things.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n