Vacation Book

"People do things like this, they do, and if it doesn't make them happy, at least it keeps them alive."

A man, Myers, searches for an old classmate he hasn't seen or talked to in years so that he can kill him.

The two men at the center of this novel aren't remarkable, if anything they are painfully average. They aren't down and out losers, but they are the type of person who has had their life and personality grinded out of them by everyday life. They are faceless people you have to share your personal space with on the morning commute, or the person one car over from you staring straight ahead in the daily bumper to bumper rush hour congestion. The unremarkable qualities of the characters is part of this book's remarkableness. This could easily be another novel of discontent, or of urban / suburban angst over the 'unfairness' of life not dealing out cards that make us all the geniuses we know ourselves to be. These characters just trudge through life, and then something happens and one of them begins to trudge along on a murderous trail after another, who unwittingly leads both of them from the dreary hell-hole of Syracuse New York (does anyone out there actually like Central New York cities? Where are the novels that are thinly disguised love letters to Syracuse or Rochester or Utica?) to Central America.

I really enjoyed the juxtaposition of fractured narrative style, the inventiveness, with the depiction of the characters. I liked that there was no smug chuckle at them to be heard through the pages while the story swirled and unfolded in a pleasing non-linear fashion. There was non of the ironic wink wink nudge nudge that I almost expect in works published by McSweeney's (or maybe I'm just expecting everyone to be like Dave Eggers, who hangs like a dark cloud over everything they do, even though most books have nothing similar with him). I couldn't help feeling a little sad after reading this book that this is one of the 'lesser' known McSweeney's books, but it's one of the more coherently realized novels I've read by them.

Why didn't this book get more attention? Why didn't I pay any attention to it? I wouldn't have even read it if Karen hadn't found it at the Housing Works dollar book sale (a dollar for this wonderful book! And it appears to be unread, without any noticeable shelf wear. Sharp corners, unbroken spine. A new book for a dollar!) and told me that Oriana had loved this one, or that it was the first book she ever read for work that she really like, or something like that.

I'd recommend keeping an eye out for this one and giving it a chance. It's one of the gems hiding in McSweeney's backlist.