Michael R. Brown

Received ‘Edited Galley’ for ‘Review Only’ in mail – opened book – read until page 113 – closed book, threw up.

My regular readers know (I hope) that I normally do write such short and negative reviews. However, about this book, there can be no other review that I can write. When I read about the plane crash (on page 113) and found myself thinking, “It’s a shame he didn’t die in the plane crash, then I wouldn’t have to read this book.” I realized it was time to shut the book, give it 0 stars and go on with my life.

How I wrote this review is how the book is written, only he covers his life practically from birth on in such a fashion, all the trivial mundane events in his life. The words tedious and boring come to mind. I am afraid if I write more, then this review will become tedious and boring. I always try to be kind with my reviews, I certainly don’t want a reputation as a hater, here the kindness will be to the people who read my review, if you still want to read this book, read a good portion of it before you buy it. Please don’t waste your money.

For those unfamiliar with my rating systems ’0 Stars: Blech, wanted to leave it in the subway, on the tracks’, I didn’t do this for two reasons, (1) that would be littering and (2) I buy expensive bookmarks and I didn’t want to lose one. However, if anyone is going camping and needs paper to start their campfire, I have about 140 sheets of 20lb stock you can use. Sans bookmark.… (mehr)

Brown’s writing style is hands-down the most alienating I have ever read. I genuinely have no idea what he was trying to accomplish with this style because even my initial suspicion about his use of truncated sentences and extraordinary overuse of em-dashes was not borne out by the way he used them. I have an odious habit of turning down a page corner when I come across a passage I find meaningful or terrible. I encountered so many terrible passages in Brown’s book that I had to change my method. I had to underline passages with a highlighter. I wore out two highlighters and just gave up around page 255. My husband commented that I needed less a highlighter than a can of spray paint.

The first 50 pages or so use what is more or less proper sentence structure but the sentences and use of language are often so bad I was stunned. For example:

One stifling burning-sun day we’d brewed strong pure lemonade and sold paper cups on the Harristown sidewalk fronting Mrs Castelli’s.

Okay, the “burning-sun” part is all right, I guess. But how does one brew lemonade? And why would they sell paper cups when they evidently had lemonade to sell. These are niggling points, I am aware, but are a foreshadowing of the complete breakdown in writing that is to come.

I crossed the lawn, walked up black steel staircase on side of Farragut Hall – great rambling wood building, once shore hotel now dormitory – waved from landing.

I know there is an experimental element to this book. I am going to say this and I know it is not universal, but there is generally nothing experimental about refusing to use articles. If there was some urgency when Brown does this, a conversational trope to indicate haste or mental skipping, I could see it. But there’s not. Sometimes he uses them but a lot of the time he doesn’t and there is no literary reason to explain it. It is distracting and adds nothing to the narrative or overall function of the book. It makes this book about a love affair seem robotic.

His use of contractions, while technically grammatically correct, also are distracting. These are but a taste of the hundreds of odd contractions in the book:

…an officer’d said my roommate was being held in infirmary…

After I’d absorbed the book, desire’d stirred.

Mother’d stopped with beatings, chokings – father’d used her for sex pleasures from an early age.

Given that Brown could have written in simple past tense and achieved the exact same meaning, these contractions are not only not necessary, but often seem pretentious. They certainly disrupt the flow of his writing. Reread that last example. The power of the statement of his wife’s abuse is made coy, almost like a line from an Andrew Marvell poem, by his use of contraction instead of simply saying, “Her mother stopped with beatings and chokings and her father sexually abused her from an early age.” Add to it that the statement that her mother stopped abusing her combined with the statement that her father sexually abused her makes no sense and the dash rather than a conjunction or semi-colon disrupts the flow, and it begins to be obvious why I consider this to be a bad book. Read the entire review here: http://ireadoddbooks.com/she-and-i-a-fugue-by-michael-r-brown/… (mehr)