Goodreads | The Brief History of the Dead

Jamie rated it:

(review of isbn 1400095956)

01/11/08

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in January, 2008

recommended to Jamie by: Miina

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Few writers have the abilty to write from a gender that is not their own with any real believability and Brockmeier isn't one. It's unfortunate, because the idea for the story was good, dare I say even haunting, but in the end, like Brockmeier's "virus," his inability to make me believe in Laura's character or thought pattern was just as contagious and, ultimately, deadly.
Salon's senior writer seemed to think this book was a manifesto. As I mentioned above, I see the creativity and...more Few writers have the abilty to write from a gender that is not their own with any real believability and Brockmeier isn't one. It's unfortunate, because the idea for the story was good, dare I say even haunting, but in the end, like Brockmeier's "virus," his inability to make me believe in Laura's character or thought pattern was just as contagious and, ultimately, deadly.
Salon's senior writer seemed to think this book was a manifesto. As I mentioned above, I see the creativity and impressiveness. However, all-in-all, it pulled A Widow For a Year on me. I use Irving's Widow For a Year (it's better, over-all, I think), because it was a book in which I was throughly engrossed but it didn't change the fact that for some reason Irving had tried to write as a woman an failed.
Widow for a year wasn't ruined by Irving's choice of leading character, but it was hindered. He did such a great job writing her father...shame.
I only wish to express my regret that he choose to make the leading character Laura, rather than say, Hank or Mike. I also wish he had made the cast of "city" character's a little smaller, though I understand, the idea is so novel it would be hard to resist showing more of the city through the lense of multiple characters as a means of casting a bigger picture. As it was, there was a lot of "setting" (ironically, typically a female-writers trait--this was supposed to be "all women could write" with any authority since they never did anything, owned anything or went any where) and almost no chracter development.
Yes, Laura does do a lot of musings--but really. She has sex with her first journalism professor, she knows it's not going anywhere...blah blah blah. And no, I'm not "every" woman and my opinion is, just that, an opinion, but I do know when I read Wally Lamb I am not obsessively distracted by "that's not accurate or believable." I was with Brockmeier, I was with Widow For a Year...heck, I was with the Di Vinci Code (but that was ALL the characters, they were all trite, though I did still brave winter blackness in Brooklyn at five a.m. to sit and shiver to read it. I did like it. There, I said it. I won't lie. I used to eat baking soda when I was little too, I don't know why but admiting it feels the same.)
The City was a cool theory. I like it very much, and many of the asides were good, albiet, word-of-the-day, trite. I liked "red is dead, blue is new" and the notion that people keep doing what they did in life (it gives the idea that at some level we all love what we do a little bit or it at least gives us comfort). But who wouldn't know that Laura's estranged parents would get back together with out the anxieties of the world? And, the aspect for "future" was poorly executed at best--the polar ice caps, for all I know, ARE melting, right? Maybe not as heavily as the story suggests, but certainly not enough for me to know off-hand it's future set. Am i suppose to measure the permafrost or have the committed to memory? Yeah, hearing all large mammals were exstinct kind of tipped me off, but that's pretty subtle to embed that in the last few pages.
I would like to read this novel, done over, with a male protagonist and a selection of Brockmeire's top FIVE favorite "city" characters to focus on. Tell me their stories, tell me their thoughts, perceptions and life. In the word's of Mary Poppins, "well begun is half done," and this novel wasn't well begun--the notion was great, the exicution very poor. I'm often jealous of writers, simply because I have good Ideas, I think, most of us do, and I spend a lot of time writing them in notebooks and never having the abilty to write 275 pages about them in detail. Now I realize perhaps that's not such a bad thing--maybe that's a defense mechanism against medicore writing...or maybe it's laziness. ...less

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