Cost

I know, two posts in one day. I finished the long, bad Against the Day a few days ago, and I finished the shorter, better Cost today.

Cost delves into a family that learns of and reacts to the heroin addiction of one character, Jack. We meet the family just before they learn of this addiction. The mother and father are divorced, and the father has remarried. Jack's maternal grandparents are on the scene, as are a maternal aunt and older brother. Most of the book happens during the course of a few days, although there is some follow-up that occurs later.

Robinson does a nice job of shifting among the perspectives of different family members. It's somewhat similar to that of Jodi Piccoult, although it's not dramatic and sustained in the same way. She seems to "check in" with each of the various characters without the dramatic shift. I enjoyed that style.

The story was very engaging, although I had to skip some of the explicit descriptions of shooting up. I'm way too squeamish for that stuff.

This book is a quick read without sacrificing psychological intensity.

Against the Day

I haven't posted anything for a long time because I was slogging through this book. Spoiler alert: it sucks. It took me forever to read it because a) it was 1085 pages long, and b) I couldn't get into the book. So many times I thought about quitting it, but I just can't stand to do that. I read this book because it was one of the 1001 books to read before you die. Trust me, you can die in peace without reading this.

One issue was the numerous extremely long sentences that are individually difficult to follow, such as the following:

"Appearing these days in the infant science of counter-terrorism as an all-purpose code name, the bloke you sent out a discreet summons for to alert your own security staff to a crisis, the real "Inspector Sands," beleaguered, ever struggling to define and maintain a level of professional behavior, unaware of his drift into legend, soon enough aged beyond his years and sweated into a moodiness at home that could not but slop over onto the wife and kids, would find by midcareer no time even to take of his hat, hurrying as ever from one emergency to the next--"Ah, Sands, there you are, and high time too."

It's also very difficult to follow because it involves 39 characters (according to Wikipedia) with really weird names, such as:

• Lew Basnight
• Chick Counterfly
• Darby Suckling
• Sloat Fresno
• Yashmeen Halfcourt
• Deuce Kindred
• Cyprian Latewood
• Lake Traverse
• Professor Heino Vanderjuice
• Scarsdale Vibe

These characters travel all over much of the world and cross paths with each other in the most unlikely of situations over the course of about 30 years.

The story involves time travel, gratuitous sex, confusing mathematical theories, and rediculous songs. I checked out some reviews, and here are some of my favorite snippets:

• "All the paranoia and silliness and vast workings out of history make it easy to overlook the sheer beauty of Pynchon's prose." - Mark Feeney, Boston Globe
• "Rambling, pompous and often completely incomprehensible" - The Economist
• "It's a world of mystery and paranoia, of inchoate longing, of disillusionment and anticlimax. Like Pynchon's characters, we wander through a swarm of hints that both promises light and darkens what little day we have." - Greg Hollingshead, The Globe & Mail
• "Against the Day is built out of vast amounts of period detail, from ladies' hats to the arcane minutiae of the mathematical squabbles of the day...(I)t's quite a challenge to hold its multitudinous threads together in your head sufficiently clearly to grasp what it is they're being woven together to form." - James Lasdun, The Guardian
• "This shambling ragbag of prose rattles with more than a hundred characters, multiple settings in this world and others and a multitude of narratives held together by gossamer skeins of plot." - David Goldblatt, The Independent
• "It is a humongous, bloated jigsaw puzzle of a story, pretentious without being provocative, elliptical without being illuminating, complicated without being rewardingly complex." - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
• "There is too much going on among too many characters in too many places. There are also too many tonal shifts, as though Pynchon set out to mimic all the styles of popular fiction -- boys’ adventure stories, science fiction, Westerns, comic books, hardboiled crime fiction, spy novels, soft-core porn." - Louis Menand, The New Yorker
• "The text is overwhelming, unstable, encyclopaedic and extravagantly allusive." - David Gale, The Observer

And, there are many more. Don't waste your time on this huge book.