This Book Will Save Your Life

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Really a brilliant book that will surprise you and make you glad you read it - I can see it as a wonderful movie (indie film of course). He'd so thoroughly removed himself from the world of dependencies and obligations, he wasn't sure he still existed. The impossibility of knowing another person completely is one of life’s painful truths, and [this] collection remind us of that—but [it] also shows that there are, at least, tools available to help us try.

She captures the enchantment of generosity - that sense of adventure you get when you step out of your own circle of need into someone else's, and the weird feeling of invulnerability it gives you (at one point Richard ends up in a high-speed car chase with some kidnappers). Listening to Anhil expound on the perpetual dissatisfaction of Americans always on the go, Novak finally takes the time to smell the coffee. Yes, things bloom year-round and the sun comes out more days than not, but there is also a strangeness to the earth there. From Anhil, the existentialist donut man, to the overworked ex-wife (she who shall not be named, I guess), to misguided, sweet Ben, to the misunderstood, sweet Nic, to Cynthia---who I can so relate to---but most of all, I love Richard. The trauma causes Richard to look at the world and his outward success differently and he begins to make connections with the people he encounters--the man who sells him donuts, a woman he sees crying in the produce section, a neighbor he had never talked to--and with the people that he has spent a great deal of his adult life trying to avoid--his parents, his brother, his ex-wife, and the son he abandoned.I would be done reading for the day and my heart would ache because I missed the characters so much. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. He spoke properly and it was old-timey, and yet he was a paedophile who was imprisoned for a heinous crime. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. A big American story with big American themes, the saga of the triumph of a new kind of self-invented nuclear family over cynicism, apathy, loneliness, greed, and technological tyranny…this novel has a strong moral core, neither didactic nor judgmental, that holds out the possibility of redemption through connection.

In the end, Richard is also brought back in closer touch with his family; his aging parents, his brilliant brother, the beloved ex-wife whom he still desires, and finally, before the story's breathtaking finale, with his estranged son Ben. Those with money in the book seem to be shallow and self-invented and those without have, thinks the protagonist, the secret of life. Unlike Kravinsky, his generosity doesn't hurt him much and may be just another way of spending money.I’ve been interested in the ongoing and endless struggle between a person’s public persona and who they are at home, the idea that we can’t be in public who we are in private. In New York, there are a million people on the street, bearing witness that there is someone sharing your experience and you’re never alone. And who are these characters that weave in and out of your life leaving merely a smudge of an impression?

There’s no question where the book is going, but the pacing is just right, the tone warm, and the characters sympathetic, even when making dumb decisions. C. graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Iowa, lives in New York City and teaches at Princeton University. So, Richard embarks on this crazy, sometimes too surreal to be true, but maybe it can be, sort of journey.If you're as isolated and disconnected as Richard, you'll find the details here surprising and hilarious, but otherwise, it's yesterday's news. Narratives about the very wealthy often have a glow of limitless possibility that verges on enchantment, and here, when Richard's house is menaced by an encroaching sinkhole, he lifts his de Kooning off the wall and rents an all-white house in Malibu. I just have to mention the blurb on the back from blurbwhore Stephen King, one of the most farcical blurbs I have ever read: "I think this brave story of a lost man's reconnection with the world could become a generational touchstone, like Catch-22 or The Catcher in the Rye. I recommend it to anyone who's questioning their existence, the meaning of it all, or who just wants to vicariously live the experience of coming to terms with it all. The automatic gate peels back, the front door opens, and there he is in jeans and a white T-shirt, a little rumpled, a little worn—startlingly sexy.

This is the start of a sequence of events that make Raiders of the Lost Ark look like a walk through your local library. I read this book faster than I usually do because the prose just flowed off the page and through my brain. It takes an intense attack of engulfing pain—and a brief hospital visit where diagnosis is elusive—for him to discover his self-made exile.Homes is confident and consistent in her odd departures from life as we know it, sustaining credibility by getting details right. M. Homes’s This Book Will Save Your Life inverts such tales in a droll, satirical adventure of personal redemption that turns on the absurd.