Early Review: Pretend All Your Life

It's been a long time, but at last I am once more posting another selection I received from the LibraryThing Early Reviewer's program. (I know. You're all thrilled. Restrain thyselves, if you please.)

The latest selection is Pretend All Your Life, the debut novel by Joseph Mackin, which deals with the aftermath of the September 11th attacks in New York City. The novel hit bookshelves on, of all days, April 1. (Unfortunate? Appropriate? You be the judge.) I have posted below, as per standard operating procedure, my review of this slim tome, for those who may be interested.

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Pretend All Your Life is a perfectly okay novel. I suppose that falls under the category of damning with faint praise, but I can't think of any other thing to say that's more apt. Its interest in a significant historical event, one that has only very rarely been handled with both depth and sensitivity, is admirable and brave, but I did not find that 9-11 really added any kind of depth to the story. I left this book wanting to have liked it more than I did, but not able to truly find an substantive reason to give it higher marks.

The novel revolves around tortured plastic surgeon Dr. Richard Gallin, whose practice has been suffering in the months since 9-11 ravaged New York City. Beyond his mere financial troubles, he is also mourning the loss of his son Bernardo, who died in the attacks, an event that renews thoughts of his former wife, who passed away many years before. As he struggles to fill the voids, his life becomes complicated by the presence of a journalist looking to ruin him, and the reemergence of a figure from his past who makes an unexpected and uneasy demand of him.

On the surface, the novel seems very interested in giving depth and interest to its characters, but this is not sustained as the work plays on. We get a strong sketch of Gallin, whose frustrations and listlessness are awkwardly but interestingly intermixed with his sexual longings. For a plastic surgeon, this is an interesting juxtaposition, one that leads the reader to expect a depth of profundity that is ultimately not found. Gallin ends up being little more than a puppet, bending to the whims of a cast of supporting characters that are shockingly static. Gallin's girlfriend Ana serves as little more than a token love interest and a source for tears. Conniving journalist Nick Adams is merely a rat whose tendency to walk around rehearsing his moments of triumph is borderline laughable. Even Bernardo's widow Kiran offers little more than a physical body for Gallin to guiltily fawn over. For a novel so invested in the notion of identity, too many identities fall far too flat.

Yet the novel most notably struggles because its B plot, involving Gallin's controversial firing of a nurse who tested positive for HIV, does not seem to match the impact or substance of the A plot. AIDS enters the plot early and its entrance feels lucid, natural. But as the novel progresses, Mackin almost feels the need to militantly explore the notion of the virus, to the point where it feels in contradiction to the questions the novel raises about a world after 9-11. The notion of this very pre-WTC epidemic invading a novel that is so intensely focused on the aftermath of the attacks feels unnatural and manufactured. And in fact, this is what I feel is the novel's greatest weakness: in its effort to combine several "big" ideas into a relatively compact, high-concept narrative, it all feels too convenient, too convoluted, too constructed. The plot feels so disconnected from its underlying meaning that the characters and events feel not like real people and events, but as a series of specific acts and objects that develop because the author needs them too, not because the story logically moves that way. There is little ebb and flow to the novel, only pushing and pulling.

Unfortunately, saying more requires a spoiler alert so, Reader, consider yourself warned. Where the novel becomes most troubling is in its handling of the return of Bernardo, whose demands on Gallin are couched in the language of rebirth and renewal that were commonplace after 9-11. As a cultural landmark, Bernardo's justifications are legitimate and accurate, but as he continually prattles on about how Gallin could never truly understand his motivations, these feelings lose their impact. If Mackin's intent is to characterize how Bernardo's feelings belong only to those who lived through 9-11, this is, at worst, an arrogant and unhelpful assertion, one that reinforces the type of American selfishness that purportedly inspired the attacks in the first place. At best, it is, to be blunt, lazy writing. A novel that deals with deep thoughts needs to explore those thoughts thoroughly, not reduce them to mere clichés. Either Mackin doesn't want to explore these ideas or he can't--either way, he should not if he can't do so completely.

By the time Pretend All Your Life ends, it feels strangely abrupt and, despite its meager but patient build-up, unsatisfying. In a way, this mirrors the suddenness and surprise of 9-11 itself, a singular moment that causes everything to come to a screeching halt. But there is very little sense that anything substantial has happened, or that anyone has been able to realize what they wanted. And the final gesture, one that is surely meant to be dramatic and foreboding, instead comes off as a line that begs for more where there is nothing more to find. I may be in the minority, but I feel this is an ironically appropriate image for the novel itself: it wants to be profound, expressive, and dramatic, but offers little substance beyond its surface intrigue. William Gibson's Pattern Recognition proved that 9-11 is ready for novelistic treatment, and so I'm convinced there's more to find within this story, but I fear Mackin has not unearthed it. As a 9-11 metaphor, it is fitting; as a novel, it is sadly underwhelming.

Mayday

Hi there again, friends. It's been quite a while, I know.

If it's any consolation, know first and foremost that I've missed you horribly. It's been frustrating to think that I've got so much to tell, so many stories to impart, so many ideas bouncing around in my brain--and yet, so little time to let them coalesce and develop and become real and true on the typewritten page. This wasn't how I'd planned for things to happen at all, but the truly funny thing is that, for the last two months, that's been the unofficial motto of my life. Strange, eh?

When last you heard from me, I was riffing on one of my Early Reviewer books. This was way back in 2009, and while I've been quiet for the first four months of 2010, it hasn't been for lack of news to impart. In fact, things have been a veritable whirlwind of excitement.

Let's, for the moment, forget completely about January. It was, frankly, a fucked-up month, with lots of fucked-up emotions and events that could be easily construed as fucked-up. If I was hoping to take 2010 by the horns and start the decade off strong, I failed in spectacular fashion. But, on the upside, I got a start date for that new job I'd been alluding to in previous posts, a date that, I figured, would mark the start of the beginning of a new, exciting, and totally different looking life.

At the risk of messing with my time-honored tradition of narrative suspense, I should let you know that things aren't quite as green and lovely as I'd anticipated. Perhaps ye, O faithful readers who have stuck with me through thick and thin, may have already guessed that something, anything, everything would find itself scattered and awry by the time its implications had managed to enter into focus. But while that pattern--reinforced, no doubt, by years of self-hatred, self-distrust, and self-defeat--was not a shock, the actual events that transpired to mire me, once more, too soon, in a pit of self-created despair did not, for once, have anything to do with me. This time, my friends, I didn't do this to myself.

Which is perhaps why I have returned once more to my writing, to getting these words down and out for others to see, because writing has always been a refuge for me--hell, it's a refuge for me today (but more on that later, I promise). I've come to the realization that I need to devote myself to this work, and I need to do more than to think about it, to say it, to write it in blog posts that, taken as a whole, increasingly sound like an over-and-over-and-over-again repetition of the same broken-record mantra that, despite all the talking, I can't quite seem to put into action.

I can't promise this will be the moment that changes it all. But I've had some pretty substantive moments over the past few months, moments I've neglected to share. Neglect, I shall, no more.

The move to DC has been...interesting, to say the least. The move proper took place three months ago to the day, when, after a day of loading lots of my crap into a fairly cramped bedroom in an Annandale basement, I handed over my first official rent check to my landlord. It's been a hell of a ride since then, one that commenced with an immediate trip to Texas to see Karen and, presumably, clear my mind in advance of the beginning of my job.

Funny story: panic attacks have a funny way of not clearing one's mind. Just saying.

Another funny story: ER visits are not the most romantic way to spend Valentine's Day weekend. Again, just saying.

So upon my return to the greater Washington, DC, area, I was filled with a touch more trepidation than I was hoping. As a man of reason and overthinker extraordinaire, I spent much of my time trying to figure out what the hell it was that sent me into a hospital with a raging fit of anxiety. Which left me woefully underprepared for the commencement of my "real-world" life on February 22, when my training began.

Fortunately, I seemed to fit in pretty nicely. Sure, the training was extensive and a lot to handle, but I have also thrived considerably in the classroom setting, and this experience was no exception. By the end of the class five weeks later, I had earned the valedictorian award for having the best cumulative test scores of all my classmates. And I'd earned one other thing: a new roommate.

See, as my fortunes were improving at work and I gained confidence in my decision to come to DC in the first place, that confidence seemed to rub off on Karen, who felt increasingly motivated to join me in DC, find a job, and forge out on our path together. Noble goals, surely, and goals that I was all too happy to embrace, as what more could a guy ask for than to have his woman offer to come thousands of miles to be by his side?

The problem is, as has oft been the case in my life, the moment I let things believe they're going well, that's when they take a turn for the worse. First, despite gaining the approval of my landlord and roommate for Karen's indefinite stay, tension began to mount almost immediately in the form of silly passive-aggressiveness and a general unlikablility from the roommate (who, truth be told, wasn't terribly likable in the first place). We tried our best to not let this enter into our lives, but as the needling became more frequent and the frustration of an increasingly unsuccessful job search mounted, things got a little unsavory here and there. Nothing too bad, truth be told, but just unpleasant. And avoidable, which is really what bothered me most.

But on top of all this came a ray of hope: just as Karen was preparing to hear on a significant and much-wanted offer from an agency in the area, another interview popped up very suddenly--and almost just as suddenly came an offer. Dear readers, I tell you, after so many months of hearing "no," to finally hear a "yes" made me so damn happy for her. Within days, we were looking at an apartment, planning to move out of the basement and away from the toxicity of present roommate relations, and preparing for the page to truly turn on the next chapter.

And then it all turned sour.

Karen has discussed it in detail herself [so I'll not go into any more detail here, as it's not my place] and, with her blessing, I can tell you that something happened. Something catastrophic. To borrow the parlance of our times, a game-changer. Two weeks ago Saturday, April 17, Karen's mom passed away, very suddenly and without any warning. I've long prided myself on my ability to convey feelings and emotions in my writing, as it's a skill not many are blessed with, but I have to be honest when I tell you, faithful readers, that it was such an emotional and mental collapse that I can't even begin to describe it.

And frankly, that's where I've been the past two weeks. I'll confess that I have little room to speak of catastrophe compared to what Karen is experiencing, but in the aftermath of what's occurred, it's been agonizingly difficult to extract myself from the mire. Everything really has changed. The apartment is gone. I'm still in the basement. The job, which has since exited training and entered into real-deal big-time mode, is frustrating the shit out of me. And, as of this morning, I'm once more alone in this God-forsaken room.

I've spoken to lots of people about this over the past few days, all of whom have urged me to stay strong and focused and try not to let things bother me too much--which is easier said than done, but nonetheless appreciated. What hurts the most is how suddenly and quickly everything changed, from the heights of ecstasy to the depths of the darkest despair, with no warning or preparation. It's been one of the worst kicks in the teeth I've ever experienced--and again, I haven't even come close to taking the brunt of it. So on top of all that, I feel horrendously guilty for having taken it as hard as I have.

But the simple fact, which is so impossibly hard to deny at this point, is that everything has changed. I've learned that this whole endeavor has been a mistake--not one I never should have made, I suspect, but one that's going to be really hard to fix. I'm doing my damnedest, because if there's one thing I have learned, it's that complacency is easy to accept but damn near impossible to live with. And at this point, the status quo is not cutting it.

So keep your eyes peeled for more frequent posts to come. There's bound to be another adventure on the horizons, even if I have no damn clue what that adventure is right now. Hopefully it'll come to me soon. But in the meantime, I'll be writing, because that has been very much missing as of late, and if I ever hope to regain the sense of confidence and composure I need to dig myself out of this mire, it's going to have to start from there.