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In college we did some
pretty nerdy stuff. For instance, we named all of the rooms in our
fraternity based on that semester's occupants and the general personality
of the room itself. My room one semester, for example, was named "room
with a Jew." It was named as such because I am, in fact, a Jew,
and because we had a nice big window that overlooked a park of sorts,
as well as a nice sorority house. There was another room called "stairway
to boredom" because some felt its occupants were quiet and, well,
boring. That paired with the fact one obnoxious p.o.s. brother had
installed a spiral staircase going up to one of the lofts at some
point cemented this as one of the best names ever. That's a long way
to go to explain that if this book were to be named in such a manner,
it would be called "escalator to boredom." Seriously, the
guy talks about his damn shoelaces for 144 pages. The gimmick here
(and it is no doubt a gimmick) is that we get to peak into an ordinary
guy's mind on his escalator ride up to his corporate office. I would
rather perform bowel surgery on a hemophiliac walrus. I thought that
his mundane b.s. was going to have subtext or Zen leanings, or any
tinge of mystery, but we seriously get to hear about the guy ruminating
on such fascinating topics as paper towels, bendy straws and milk
cartons. It's like a really unfunny episode of Seinfeld.
You know, "what's the deal with carbonation!?" I sat aghast
that this could be considered literature. It's like the precursor
to lonely cat-lady blogs, but with no affection for anything or anyone.
I suppose the gimmick novel is a genre unto itself, but I've seen
it pulled off in other instances with so much more conviction and
effort that this thing just feels embarrassing. And the balls to charge
full price for what should technically be classified a novella!
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