So the novel was published and out in the world in 2001. And if it is a VERY AMERICAN novel which deals with AMERICAN ISSUES around the CURRENT TIME PERIOD/EVENTS.. oh. It's about the turn of the century. There ya go. It's also about the MIDWEST (and CLINICAL DEPRESSION) and the other sorts of gross stuff that the Midwest is known for. It's actually more about this family, an older couple, Alfred and Enid, and their three children, Gary, Chip, and Denise. So the book goes through the minds & background stories of each character.. profiling them while making the whole story happen. With more understanding of each character comes more guessing and anticipation from the readers. Additionally, more understanding of why these bleeping crazy psychotics ARE psychos!!!!!!!!!!!!! The reason cannot be that they are from the Midwest. That's too cruel. Even for a fiction.
Just some clippets I liked..
PAGE 82-83
But TV caused him such critical and political anguish that he could no longer watch even cartoons without smoking cigarettes, and he now had a lung-sized region of pain in his chest, and there was no intoxicant of any sort in his house, not even cooking sherry, not even cough syrup, and after the labor of taking his pleasure with the chaise his endorphins had gone home to the four corners of his brain like war-weary troops, so spent by the demands he’d made of them in the last five weeks that nothing, except possibly Melissa in the flesh, could marshal them again. He needed a little morale-booster, a little pick-me-up, but he had nothing better than the month-old Times, and he felt that he’d circled quite enough uppercase M’s for one day, he could circle no more.
PAGE 175
After lunch he took his mother and his son to the St. Jude Museum of Transport. While Jonah climbed into old locomotives and toured the dry-docked submarine and Enid sat and nursed her sore hip, Gary compiled a mental list of the museum’s exhibits, hoping the list would him a feeling of accomplishment. He couldn’t deal with the exhibits themselves, their exhausting informativeness, their cheerful prose-for-the-masses. THE GOLDEN AGE OF STEAM POWER. THE DAWN OF FLIGHT. A ENTURY OF AUTOMOTIVE SAFETY. Block after block of taxing text.
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