Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Amateur Barbarians, by Robert Cohen


If this novel represents modern American literature, then I'm sorely out of the loop. As the jacket points out, Cohen was "...touted by The New York Times Book Review as the 'heir to Saul Bellow and Philip Roth.'" I should have quit right then.

It was, in fact, the New York Times that pointed me to this book, top of the "100 notable books of 2009" gift list.

The problem is, the main character, Teddy Hastings, bored me so much by his narcissistic whining that by the end of the first chapter I was irritated. Just a few more pages about the other main character, as the chapter title puts it, the "melancholy" Pierce, was enough to shut me down.

Not even the attempts at building suspense worked: why was Teddy briefly in jail, why did he take a sabbatical from his job, what's up with his weird relationship with is wife? Who cares. It just isn't interesting enough to find out.

This novel gets filed in my seldom-used category of "unread."