Uneven in tone, implausible in execution.
Unfocused portrait of a young man stumbling through first jobs, young loves, voices in his head, mental institutions, a supposed engagement to Chairman Mao’s granddaughter and a cadre of Cold War psychics.
Attempting to synthesize a series of confusing events from his youth–what he considers his psychic awakening as an adolescent–Chabot employs a jarring array of coming-of-age episodes, conspiracy theories and radical leaps of logic. These exertions only muddy his central thesis–that the author’s inexplicable extrasensory perception was monitored, and possibly engendered, by a secret U.S. government program designed to combat psychic espionage by Communist China and the Soviet Union. The first two-thirds of the book, concerning Chabot’s young adulthood, feels cobbled together with tangential episodes amid periodic nods toward his burgeoning ESP, which resembles amateur ham radio conversations without the hardware. Superfluous details and inconsistent tone–the author jumps clumsily between the quotidian (his propensity for Coca-Cola) and the fantastic (a satisfyingly tense encounter with a Man in Black)–further obscure the novel’s storyline and theme. Significant events occur without plausible cause; neither his engagement to Chairman Mao’s granddaughter nor his psychic ability, both fundamental to the plot, feel convincingly developed. Coherence drifts away as readers fall deeper into the rabbit hole, and the narrative culminates in a confusing psychic contact/long-distance phone call to China via a group of possible Soviet psychic agents. By this point, readers are lost. It’s just too hard to believe Chabot contacted a secret group of Eastern Bloc psychics to renege on an already legally suspect international marriage contract mediated by his college roommate. Besides, the author gives readers little evidence to suspect he’s in danger, since these titular psychic spies act like confused interns rather than experienced Cold War agents. Chabot likewise paints a confusing personal portrait. Is he an innocent kid from Indiana tampering with strange psychic powers? Is he a scrappy pawn in a secret government program? His arrogance toward other psychics, and the FBI and CIA agents who eventually interview him, stand in marked contrast to his deference to his father and other authority figures. This smacks of posturing and it, too, is difficult to swallow. Whether or not readers accept Chabot’s intrinsic sincerity, few will accept his narrative.
Uneven in tone, implausible in execution.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-9816024-0-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Sedaris’s sense of life’s absurdity is on full, fine display, as is his emotional body armor. Fortunately, he has plenty of...
Known for his self-deprecating wit and the harmlessly eccentric antics of his family, Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day, 2000, etc.) can also pinch until it hurts in this collection of autobiographical vignettes.
Once again we are treated to the author’s gift for deadpan humor, especially when poking fun at his family and neighbors. He draws some of the material from his youth, like the portrait of the folks across the street who didn’t own a TV (“What must it be like to be so ignorant and alone?” he wonders) and went trick-or-treating on November first. Or the story of the time his mother, after a fifth snow day in a row, chucked all the Sedaris kids out the door and locked it. To get back in, the older kids devised a plan wherein the youngest, affection-hungry Tiffany, would be hit by a car: “Her eagerness to please is absolute and naked. When we ask her to lie in the middle of the street, her only question was ‘Where?’ ” Some of the tales cover more recent incidents, such as his sister’s retrieval of a turkey from a garbage can; when Sedaris beards her about it, she responds, “Listen to you. If it didn’t come from Balducci’s, if it wasn’t raised on polenta and wild baby acorns, it has to be dangerous.” But family members’ square-peggedness is more than a little pathetic, and the fact that they are fodder for his stories doesn’t sit easy with Sedaris. He’ll quip, “Your life, your privacy, your occasional sorrow—it’s not like you're going to do anything with it,” as guilt pokes its nose around the corner of the page. Then he’ll hitch himself up and lacerate them once again, but not without affection even when the sting is strongest. Besides, his favorite target is himself: his obsessive-compulsiveness and his own membership in this company of oddfellows.
Sedaris’s sense of life’s absurdity is on full, fine display, as is his emotional body armor. Fortunately, he has plenty of both.Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-316-14346-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
Possibly inspired by the letters Cleary has received as a children's author, this begins with second-grader Leigh Botts' misspelled fan letter to Mr. Henshaw, whose fictitious book itself derives from the old take-off title Forty Ways W. Amuse a Dog. Soon Leigh is in sixth grade and bombarding his still-favorite author with a list of questions to be answered and returned by "next Friday," the day his author report is due. Leigh is disgruntled when Mr. Henshaw's answer comes late, and accompanied by a set of questions for Leigh to answer. He threatens not to, but as "Mom keeps nagging me about your dumb old questions" he finally gets the job done—and through his answers Mr. Henshaw and readers learn that Leigh considers himself "the mediumest boy in school," that his parents have split up, and that he dreams of his truck-driver dad driving him to school "hauling a forty-foot reefer, which would make his outfit add up to eighteen wheels altogether. . . . I guess I wouldn't seem so medium then." Soon Mr. Henshaw recommends keeping a diary (at least partly to get Leigh off his own back) and so the real letters to Mr. Henshaw taper off, with "pretend," unmailed letters (the diary) taking over. . . until Leigh can write "I don't have to pretend to write to Mr. Henshaw anymore. I have learned to say what I think on a piece of paper." Meanwhile Mr. Henshaw offers writing tips, and Leigh, struggling with a story for a school contest, concludes "I think you're right. Maybe I am not ready to write a story." Instead he writes a "true story" about a truck haul with his father in Leigh's real past, and this wins praise from "a real live author" Leigh meets through the school program. Mr. Henshaw has also advised that "a character in a story should solve a problem or change in some way," a standard juvenile-fiction dictum which Cleary herself applies modestly by having Leigh solve his disappearing lunch problem with a burglar-alarmed lunch box—and, more seriously, come to recognize and accept that his father can't be counted on. All of this, in Leigh's simple words, is capably and unobtrusively structured as well as valid and realistic. From the writing tips to the divorced-kid blues, however, it tends to substitute prevailing wisdom for the little jolts of recognition that made the Ramona books so rewarding.
Pub Date: Aug. 22, 1983
ISBN: 143511096X
Page Count: 133
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1983
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