Reviews for God Jr.

The average rating for God Jr. based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-02-21 00:00:00 Dick Wang One of those novels I liked, but I'm not quite sure why. One of those stories that reveals itself slowly, painfully, and with a buzz on. One of those stories. I'm going to read or reread some of the reviews from people on my lists and see if I can put it together. And if I can, maybe, perhaps, like God, Jr., I'll tell you …sorta. Maybe. (This is where you pause in reading this review to simulate the time I spent reading other reviews) This one came to my attention via J N-M's review. Whether you know it or not, you're all here to inform my reading, and N-M does as good a job at that as any of you. That said, many of you do as good a job as he does'he just beat you bringing this one to my attention. So, thank you, one and all. His advice: "if you want a weird book about grief, this is it." Grief, it's always so personal, so inexplicable, something that can, at best, perhaps, only be witnessed'it is always weird. So, who, other than relief workers, goes looking for grief? Simply put, readers do. So I'm still stymied. Why does this grief story work for me, but Threats: A Novel didn't. My interest in each case originated with the same reviewer. My rating is the same for both. With Gray's novel, I think what I liked best was the potential she displays for an as yet untold story. With God, Jr., I have to wonder if what I like most is the narrator's attempts to come to terms with his grief, his grief and his guilt, albeit through the construction of a video-game inspired memorial, withdrawing from the world (akin to hiding his real disability), and trying to 'complete' the life of his son by playing the game that seems to have mattered so much to Jr. The difference in the two novels is that one is imagined (with its artifice apparent), while the other can be imagined with its characters intact.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-01-12 00:00:00 Erin E Nowjack "Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!" God Jr. does not contain graphic and gratuitous violence and sex and as such is apparently the most unusual book Dennis Cooper has written. This is the first and, so far, only of his books I've read, but several fellow readers are big fans and I've gleaned what I know about his work through their reviews. Instead of having a cast of gay characters engaged in scene after scene of violent sex and death, we have a presumably straight father quietly loosening his grip on reality in a disorienting fog of grief and marijuana. In the wake of a car accident that leaves him locked into a wheelchair and his teenage son dead, he makes strange and lonely and desperate attempts at properly grieving by trying to connect with a son-no-longer-there who he was disconnected from while alive. One way he does this is by playing a goofy video game that the son played and by smoking the weed the son smoked. In the context of this book--clouded with mourning the loss of a family member and being stoned--just about everything is haunting and a bit surreal, including the descriptions of the silly Nintendo world. There's a reviewer I'm fond of who uses the word 'harrowing' to describe this book and I think that this is an apt description within a review that I wish I'd written. I direct you there as supplemental material for this review. Looking at the reviews here on Goodreads, it seems a lot of Cooper's fans didn't like this book at all, though some certainly did. I thought it was incredibly moving in both expected and unexpected ways. The father really isn't even terribly sympathetic, despite his misfortune, but I found myself, as I often do, feeling raw and exposed and shudderingly sensitive to The Overwhelming Fact that uncountable numbers of animals, both human and not, with emotions and families and pains and desires, are birthed and snuffed out every single day--that sometimes there is no comforting eulogy available, that sometimes things just remain depressing, that groping for a word of comfort or wisdom in dark times can merely be an exercise in compounded despair, but also that we feeling thinking hoping despairing organisms can occasionally find real respite from these realities--temporarily, yes, but real all the same.