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Copy/paste the text below into your blog. <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1078189.Vacation?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="Vacation" border="0" src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/photo.goodreads.com/books/1180800038m/1078189.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1078189.Vacation?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">Vacation</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/534366.Jeremy_C_Shipp">Jeremy C. Shipp</a><br/><br/> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/11805087?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a> rating: 3 of 5 stars<br/>(This is an even longer and more rambly version of the review I did for GUD Magazine (www.gudmagazine.com).) <br/> <br/>I had to take a step back after reading Vacation to realize it really is as imaginative as it's advertised as being, because it's not so much the usual suspects, like the crazy plot antics or the political interpolations, that impressed me, but the parts that were presented more matter-of-factly, the characters and the interactions. The novel's main character, Bernard Johnson, suspends himself from his prestigious job and prestigious relationships to take his medicated, ennui-filled self off on the Vacation, a free year-long trip provided to each citizen by the oh-so-benevolent U.S. government. But he's sidetracked into the Garden, a more-or-less-terrorist more-or-less stronghold where he's detoxed and deconstructed, then shown the world as it is outside the bubble he's been limited to thus far. It's a twist, though not a very radical one, on the classic hero's journey—but in each part of the journey, the goal Bernard thinks he has is just a slight angle off from what turns out to be the real end. And fitting in with the hero-journey theme, Shipp throws in a few more classic character-types, including guides, foils, virgins, convenient geniuses, and even a bona fide Jester, but they're all nicely fleshed-out, so you have to work to recognize them as types. The characters in Vacation aren't exactly what you'd call believable, but they are true, and that's more important. <br/> <br/>Vacation is a novel with a lot of interesting ideas in it and a lot of problems. In fact, it has been referred to as a Novel of Ideas (though the narrator does his best to obscure that with pontificating; it's an interesting aspect of the style). Many of the ideas weren't as new to me as they may have been to some, but then, I read a lot of anti-corporate-globalization, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist writing, including some that's dropped off the far edge of paranoia. (Not that I'm saying Vacation is necessarily any of those things, per se, but it draws on the relevant paradigms to build the particular possible future of its setting.) A lot of other reviewers seem to think this novel really wild and crazy, and not that I don't think it's an original take, but if you've never thought about this stuff before...well, read Vacation and get thinking, because you should be! It's a good meditation on the possible outcomes of Progress, and it usually manages not to be preachy. (And as the characters point out, certain ideas are best encountered in fiction first, before they bite you on the ass in reality.) <br/> <br/>Besides its political ideas, Vacation also has plenty of interesting and thought-provoking musings on the intertwining and conflict of personal goals with political or artistic ones, the vagaries of human nature, the question of deserving what we get, and the importance of eating your vegetables—mixed in with a lot of hot air from Bernard, the former-English-teacher narrator. (In case you miss anything, the important ideas are repeated, but in a way that is usually more interestingly refrain-like—a Chorus, perhaps?—than annoying. Usually.) His characterizations of the world around him, in pithy analogies and humorous tangents, can be quite clever when they work—and when they don't, their particular brand of annoyingness does fit the character. Shipp is one of those writers who bases his craft on being a good social analyst; that's mostly a good thing, but there are almost more observations about the contradictions of—and the nifty things about—our society and humanity in general packed into the space of this short novel than it can hold. <br/> <br/>In fact, Shipp could have written a much longer book with the same basic content; this book is good and spare, mostly without feeling too abbreviated. In general, it's nice to have a bit of a challenge, to have to fill in some of the emotional details for oneself, though there are a few points of character development (and character-relationship development) on which it might have been nice to have a bit more to go on; at times I felt more like I was giving the author the benefit of the doubt than accepting a challenge. In any case, the novel is never boring, even the parts that are just the narrator whining—but interestingly, I didn't find the bits that would usually be called action sequences particularly more exciting than the rest; the book is very evenly paced. <br/> <br/>As for the problems.... Well, most of the things I found problematic about the novel came at me full-force with the introduction; I half-suspect the author of trying to warn off the faint of heart. So if you can get through that, you know what you're in for, and at least things don't get much worse. The introduction frames the whole novel as a personal letter from the narrator to his parents and advertises that we're in for an abrasive read. The intro is clumsily written at various levels, and though I'd like to think that's on purpose because it's supposed to be a personal letter, I frankly suspect the author was just trying too hard to get a certain feel and not paying much attention to the details. The voice is at its most deliberately obnoxious at the beginning—which does accurately introduce the narrator's attitude (and means our feelings towards him can only improve from there), but unfortunately, it emphasizes the disconnect between the voice of the narrator-at-the-time-of-the-story's-events and the narrator-at-the-time-of-the-telling, when he is a different person than he was at the beginning of the events he narrated. (Of course, it makes sense for one to get into the mood of the time one is describing and tell it like one felt it at the time, but on the other hand, the introduction is a direct address from the (later) now, so its over-the-top whininess doesn't quite fit.) <br/> <br/>This letter-framing actually doesn't make that much sense in the context of the novel as a whole—unless we assume it's one of those letters that never gets sent (but then why use the conceit at all?)—given that it's full of Secrets the narrator wouldn't want to tell even his parents, but on the other hand, it couldn't be done away with without changing the whole feel of the novel. (The whole thing has the sort of intermittent petulance that someone who has grown up as much as the narrator has at the time he's writing can exhibit only towards their parents.) There are a number of such small implausibilities, as well as a couple of discontinuities and general factual unlikelihoods, scattered throughout the book, along with more low-level editing problems, but it's not bad for a first novel. <br/> <br/>I'd be more impressed with this particular obnoxious (patronizing, melodramatic, whiney) narrator if he weren't so similar in voice to the narrator of "Baby Edward", in GUD Magazine's Issue 2. If I hadn't read that, I might think a lot of the clumsiness and roughness was carefully constructed and that this was a painstaking creation, but knowing what I do, I'm not as impressed. (I also would have been more inclined to think this was a carefully-constructed voice rather than just the author's own roughness if there hadn't been a random clumsily-inserted passage near the end where we discover the narrator is a writer (Just like Shipp, he writes really weird stuff people frequently don't get! Imagine!). I'm not sure what Shipp was going for putting that in there, but for me, it had the effect of making me distrust his creativity.) But in balance, the narrator's obnoxiousness is well-integrated into the story and makes sense as part of the whole, wherever it came from. <br/> <br/>As the book goes on, the character changes and one gets more used to his abrasiveness anyway, so it ceases to interfere as much. One can fall into the rhythm and special logic of the story and be captivated by its charms—and I, at least, certainly was. <br/><br/><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/634085?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>