I think he is a good actor and a brilliant screenwriter – Defending Your Life is one of my favorite movies and I thought he voiced Marlin (Nemo’s father from Finding Nemo) and Hank Scorpio (a Bond-esque villain in the Simpsons episode You Only Move Twice) brilliantly. Heck, I even liked him in The Muse.
Furthermore, I like (well, used to like) the genre of “Dystopic Visions of the Not-So-Distant Future”. 1984, It Can’t Happen Here, The Stand… you name it. I guess I just had a fascination with what some people saw as a dire warning of tomorrow if we continue to strut merrily down the self-destructive path they perceived humanity to be on.
You would think I would have loved this book, right?
Picture a world where 75% or more of the people in it are actually Albert Brooks. They could be men or women, old or young, they could be living in the lap of luxury or a newly destitute victim of a 9.1 earthquake that levels a major U.S. city – they all have at least one snappy (or sardonic) one-liner to say per “scene”. Fun in small doses, never-ending-knock-knock-joke irritating in a novel. This behavior is certainly unrealistic for the President of the United States (albeit one as dorky, weak-willed, and thoroughly un-electable as the one in this story) who is supposedly overseeing a country on the verge of total financial collapse while dealing with the largest earthquake in human history.
Speaking of badly-described natural disasters, without giving too much away, the quake causes a big mess and displaces a lot of people. Traffic is disrupted because some lanes are shut down. Lots of buildings have cracks in them and might be unsafe. Some planes needed to be re-routed. Also, at least two people died as a direct result. A darned inconvenience.
Apparently, in this world of tomorrow, there are not many technological advances beyond what we have right now... or, in fact, had twenty years ago, and what is there is all very haphazardly applied. There are self-piloting airplanes (fine) and cars (yawn), but not boats (huh?). The book is rife with distracting examples like this.
There is no real plot. Every page seems to hint at a promise of something… anything… about to happen but it never pans out. People are always almost up to something, but they never actually do anything. The reader is forced to wait around until 95% of the way through the book until the “something” he has been waiting for occurs, and it is literally nothing. I would say “the reader is left wondering what happens next” but that is not true – I could not care less and you probably wouldn’t either.
The whole thing has an oily sheen of what they call in the movie business “industry humor” and reads like someone was thinking “this would make a great black comedy film someday”. I guess it would, but it is going to need to be punched up quite a bit to elevate it to “comedy” status on par with something like Doctor Strangelove. If it is billed as a serious movie then a lot more work will need to be done to somehow hack and hew all of the “witty” dialog out of it without turning the scenes into just two or three people staring at each other in awkward silence for minutes at a time while events dramatically fail to unfold around them.
The story is a great idea, poorly executed. I agree with many of the two-star reviews at Amazon. Read a few before you read this book.
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2 comments:
My goodness. I just finished this book and came across this review. I thought it was a page turner. I was not even familiar with Brooks in the movies, this just read like a great novel. I guess that's what makes horse races.
I was not familiar with this author but I love stories that take place in the future and simply fell in love with this book. The characters are great as are the ideas. What a pleasant surprise to find a new author that I like so much.
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