What do you think?
Rate this book
Lucky Man
Book by Tanzer, Ben
- GenresFiction
224 pages, Paperback
First published March 15, 2007
2 people are currently reading
149 people want to read
About the author
Ben Tanzer
40 books265 followersEmmy-award winner Ben Tanzer's acclaimed work includes the short story collection UPSTATE, the science fiction novel Orphans and the essay collections Lost in Space and Be Cool. His recent novel The Missing was released in March 2024 by 7.13 Books and was a Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year finalist in the category of Traditional Fiction and his new book After Hours: Scorsese, Grief and the Grammar of Cinema, which Kirkus Reviews calls "A heartfelt if overstuffed tribute to the author’s father and the ameliorative power of art," was released by Ig Publishing in May 2025. Ben is also the host of the long running podcast This Podcast Will Change Your Life and lives in Chicago with his family.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
February 5, 2008
I just finished reading/reviewing this book for the author, Ben. Findings are below...
__________________
In this book, Lucky Man, by Ben Tanzer, I found many grammatical errors, such as commas needed in several places and words missing to complete phrases, such as the/and/a. I found misspellings and words used out of context, such as their/there, and anyways/ any way. At times the language can be abusive, but given the situation and the characters I don’t feel it takes away from the story. In my opinion, the dialog between characters can be confusing in the way it was written, but did not deter me from reading.
In saying that, I found this book very compelling. Written in the first person point of view, from four different sources is not an easy task to pull off successfully. The characters were believable, and the plot intriguing. Ben Tanzer brings the hardships of four young men into your mind and tugs the heartstrings with each trial of their young lives. Reading it made me feel as if I was delving into a forbidden diary, and brought me closer to the characters. It certainly changes your thinking of an ordinary telephone ring. In retrospect, the ending was superb and had a twist, that even though the author worked up to, I did not see coming. For a debut novel, I am, overall, impressed.
Kelly Moran, Author
http://home.wi.rr.com/kellymoran
__________________
In this book, Lucky Man, by Ben Tanzer, I found many grammatical errors, such as commas needed in several places and words missing to complete phrases, such as the/and/a. I found misspellings and words used out of context, such as their/there, and anyways/ any way. At times the language can be abusive, but given the situation and the characters I don’t feel it takes away from the story. In my opinion, the dialog between characters can be confusing in the way it was written, but did not deter me from reading.
In saying that, I found this book very compelling. Written in the first person point of view, from four different sources is not an easy task to pull off successfully. The characters were believable, and the plot intriguing. Ben Tanzer brings the hardships of four young men into your mind and tugs the heartstrings with each trial of their young lives. Reading it made me feel as if I was delving into a forbidden diary, and brought me closer to the characters. It certainly changes your thinking of an ordinary telephone ring. In retrospect, the ending was superb and had a twist, that even though the author worked up to, I did not see coming. For a debut novel, I am, overall, impressed.
Kelly Moran, Author
http://home.wi.rr.com/kellymoran
July 27, 2007
A really fast-paced read, and character-driven, which I like. I've been sort of lucky, myself. This is only the fifth novel I've read in four years (the rest being story collections, mostly), and it was a decent read.
Was a little thrown by the ending, but it's my own fault, not the author's (I met him at the reading he had in town, here). When you've been reading stuff like the anthologies Interfictions and Paraspheres , your mind expands into weird places, much like some of the characters in Lucky Man on street pharmaceuticals.
Was a little thrown by the ending, but it's my own fault, not the author's (I met him at the reading he had in town, here). When you've been reading stuff like the anthologies Interfictions and Paraspheres , your mind expands into weird places, much like some of the characters in Lucky Man on street pharmaceuticals.
Read
July 1, 2020It changed my life.
December 1, 2007
(My full review of this book is larger than GoodReads' word-count limitations. Find the entire essay at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. IMPORTANT DISCLOSURE: Some of Tanzer's newest work is currently being considered for CCLaP's upcoming publishing program, which starts in spring 2008. The person ultimately making the decision is the same person who wrote today's review.)
As regular readers know, it can be a real crap shoot with me sometimes when it comes to the subject of deliberately flawed characters, and especially when it comes to such characters making the same mistakes over and over; see, for example, my much-hated scathing pan of Darren Aronofsky's usually much-loved Requiem for a Dream, which in my case just rubbed me the wrong f--king way. It's not that I don't like flawed characters, because I do in certain cases; and it's not like I deliberately hate all creative projects where such characters make the same mistakes over and over, because I understand that that is part of most humans' nature and can sometimes make for great narrative stories. But I'm also just one of those people who personally can't stand most "weak" people out in the real world, or at least let's put it here as "people who let their vices control them, not the other way around;" I guess what really determines what I think about creative projects on the subject depends ultimately on that particular artist's skill level. As fans of these types of stories can tell you, the right tale of the right deeply flawed person can be a heartbreaking, breathtaking experience, a deep and profound look at what it really means to be human; the wrong look at the subject, though, I think can feel like a clawing chore as an audience member, a dreary job that that artist thinks they have the right to "put you through," not an elevating experience that you voluntarily want to be a part of.
And that brings us to Lucky Man, a striking coming-of-age tale that is also the first novel by Chicago author Ben Tanzer, and on top of that is the very first book by new basement press Manx Media. And I'm happy to report that the novel falls into the first camp of flawed-character stories when it comes to what I was saying above; that I ended up enjoying the story and its deeply screwed-up characters quite immensely, precisely because of Tanzer's deft personal style and of the brutal minimalism used to tell its Larry-Clark-style story. It is an unflinching look at the late teens and early twenties of the typical American male, a sometimes horrid stare into the maw of cruelty that can exist between such people in such a milieu; but it is also a survey of the American casual drug scene from the early '80s to the millennium, told in the order that so many Midwestern rural males actually experience it, from beer and weed in high school to acid and ecstasy at the state college, to cocaine and crack after school when the crushing reality of grown-up redneck life comes crashing around them. As someone who grew up in a rural area of Missouri myself, I can attest that Lucky Man spoke deeply to me, in a true voice that mirrors many of my own experiences from the years being discussed here; I mean, granted, it's an exclusive look at the bad side of such experiences, a bleak cautionary tale that is much more Sam Shepard than Garrison Keilor, but as long as you're up for a dark story that relies on a white-trash setting for its flavor, this is a pretty great tale indeed.
Told as a series of first-person reminisces...
As regular readers know, it can be a real crap shoot with me sometimes when it comes to the subject of deliberately flawed characters, and especially when it comes to such characters making the same mistakes over and over; see, for example, my much-hated scathing pan of Darren Aronofsky's usually much-loved Requiem for a Dream, which in my case just rubbed me the wrong f--king way. It's not that I don't like flawed characters, because I do in certain cases; and it's not like I deliberately hate all creative projects where such characters make the same mistakes over and over, because I understand that that is part of most humans' nature and can sometimes make for great narrative stories. But I'm also just one of those people who personally can't stand most "weak" people out in the real world, or at least let's put it here as "people who let their vices control them, not the other way around;" I guess what really determines what I think about creative projects on the subject depends ultimately on that particular artist's skill level. As fans of these types of stories can tell you, the right tale of the right deeply flawed person can be a heartbreaking, breathtaking experience, a deep and profound look at what it really means to be human; the wrong look at the subject, though, I think can feel like a clawing chore as an audience member, a dreary job that that artist thinks they have the right to "put you through," not an elevating experience that you voluntarily want to be a part of.
And that brings us to Lucky Man, a striking coming-of-age tale that is also the first novel by Chicago author Ben Tanzer, and on top of that is the very first book by new basement press Manx Media. And I'm happy to report that the novel falls into the first camp of flawed-character stories when it comes to what I was saying above; that I ended up enjoying the story and its deeply screwed-up characters quite immensely, precisely because of Tanzer's deft personal style and of the brutal minimalism used to tell its Larry-Clark-style story. It is an unflinching look at the late teens and early twenties of the typical American male, a sometimes horrid stare into the maw of cruelty that can exist between such people in such a milieu; but it is also a survey of the American casual drug scene from the early '80s to the millennium, told in the order that so many Midwestern rural males actually experience it, from beer and weed in high school to acid and ecstasy at the state college, to cocaine and crack after school when the crushing reality of grown-up redneck life comes crashing around them. As someone who grew up in a rural area of Missouri myself, I can attest that Lucky Man spoke deeply to me, in a true voice that mirrors many of my own experiences from the years being discussed here; I mean, granted, it's an exclusive look at the bad side of such experiences, a bleak cautionary tale that is much more Sam Shepard than Garrison Keilor, but as long as you're up for a dark story that relies on a white-trash setting for its flavor, this is a pretty great tale indeed.
Told as a series of first-person reminisces...
August 11, 2008
I read this book over two fairly short flights, and Tanzer definitely has a good grasp on the voice of late teen/college aged guys.
The book is told from the perspective of four different friends, switching every chapter to a different view point. The chapters are grouped according to the story/death of the particular friend in question. I found it to be engaging until the end when the author threw in a rather overdone "twist" where the final storyteller becomes aware that the stories he thought belonged to his other friends were really his own (think of the old Fight Club question: "Who is Tyler Durden?"). Just a little too cliche for my taste.
Also, there are a bunch of typos in the book - for all I know they could be intentional although that doesn't seem likely since there not enough of them to convey some kind of theme - which is obviously annoying to a lot of people but didn't really bother me.
The book is told from the perspective of four different friends, switching every chapter to a different view point. The chapters are grouped according to the story/death of the particular friend in question. I found it to be engaging until the end when the author threw in a rather overdone "twist" where the final storyteller becomes aware that the stories he thought belonged to his other friends were really his own (think of the old Fight Club question: "Who is Tyler Durden?"). Just a little too cliche for my taste.
Also, there are a bunch of typos in the book - for all I know they could be intentional although that doesn't seem likely since there not enough of them to convey some kind of theme - which is obviously annoying to a lot of people but didn't really bother me.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 19, 2008
To the extent that Lucky Man is a first-person narrative about young men coming of age, you could say it’s fratire. But this is damned serious stuff, making the book much more ambitious, I think, than some of the other puke-on-my-own-shoes books in that genre.
This is, as the reader will guess soon enough, a last-man-standing story. In the end, the question is, “What’s it all mean?” Tanzer gives no clue, but I do give him a great deal of credit for at least raising the question.
A longer review is posted at Boychik Lit
This is, as the reader will guess soon enough, a last-man-standing story. In the end, the question is, “What’s it all mean?” Tanzer gives no clue, but I do give him a great deal of credit for at least raising the question.
A longer review is posted at Boychik Lit
November 30, 2008
Yeah, so this has only taken me months to review(I don't really know how long (Sorry Ben!). This is a very slick debut. I'd call it a coming-of-age novel, but it's more complex than that. I found all the relationships (esp the father/son dynamic) to be right on target. Some layout issues and typos make the book feel less than professional sometimes, and that's too bad: this book deserves better.
October 9, 2008
I was drawn in and became captivated. The drug trips were vivid to my imagination as was the escapism.
Update:
I changed my mind and gave this book 5 stars instead of
4 stars. From now on. In my world every writer gets 5 stars and poops Pulitzers.
Update:
I changed my mind and gave this book 5 stars instead of
4 stars. From now on. In my world every writer gets 5 stars and poops Pulitzers.
October 2, 2010
Ok, Ben, FINALLY!!!!! A+...last chapter, A+++
March 16, 2012
It most definitely changed my life.
June 27, 2014
Dudes, friendships, relationships, sex, drugs, sadness, family. Emo! And also, really great. (I esp. loved the hippie stuff b/c I always love the hippie stuff.)
July 27, 2009
God damn this book is good! It takes a few short chapters to get used to the format (which is confusing at first, switching P.O.V.s without saying who's who when you're still trying to figure out who's who and whom's whom and where they are and what's going on), but if you give it that much, you'll be wrapped up in no time.
The story moves fast. Huge events happen, little moments happen, all the while it keeps moving forward, rolling along, like the neverending calendar-page-flips of life itself, which is I think what the book is about. It's about friends growing up, and growing apart, and having to live in themselves in the day which contains all the days you've had to live through before. The rolling pace makes it feel almost like the cliff's notes to the saga of a group of friends' dissolving ties. Which is really kind of depressing, in a "The Adventures of Milo and Otis" kind of way. That movie really depressed the hell out of me when I was a kid, going around compressing the whole journey of life (birth-childhood-friendships-adolescence-love-coupling-copulating-birthing-growing old) into eighty minutes narrated by the great Dudley Moore.
So basically, Dudley Moore can tell you every major stage of your life through an allegory with dogs in eighty minutes, and Ben Tanzer can map out for you the disconnect that happens in so many groups of friends with archetypes that are actually real characters in 220 pages. Life is simple, and that's depressing.
But also kind of beautiful in it's reassurance for the things we do that we wish we could re-do, the things that we did't know how to do that we had to, and on and on and on. The lessons we had to learn, and now have to live with. It captures that late-teens-into-twenties-what-the-fuck-is-going-on-here-people-paradigm-shift that we all have to claw through.
What ads to the bigger-than-itself feeling of the book is how we don't ever really get to know many specific details about the setting. But we sense it: small town, maybe a 'burb - but it could be many settings.
Each character, even the ones who aren't as naturally introspective, are respected and given their due. You like 'em all, you feel for 'em all. You feel like you know them all intimately.
As for the actual printing - there are some typos, but I mean, really - it's a small press book. These things happen, and it's not like we can't figure out when "their" should be "there". We're grown-ups, after all. Yeah, it would be better if those typos weren't there, but they are, and the book is what it is, and it's pretty damn good! Plus, I'd give Manx Media extra props for the cover art, which is so often sadly lackluster on small press books, but here is fantastic and sums up the feel of the book before you even know what it is.
So, this is a pretty great book about friends sitting by as each other drown in the depths of despair and die in one way or another one by one, too afraid too acknowledge what they need before it's too late. It's about how unspoken care and love lead to doubts and rifts and frustration and fights and really we all just want and need to be told that we're appreciated by our friends, but at the same time often we're afraid to tell people we appreciate them, maybe because we're afraid they don't feel the same way and that we're weird or something, or that they do but they won't say it like we almost didn't - and how that can lead to bad things and it can get really sad and fucked up when people are changing but still have those ties to what they were.
So one thing I took out of this book is that you just have to say when you appreciate things, old friends and new friends alike. The book inspired me to call up an old friend who needed a call - a call I'd been putting off.
Lucky Man, I appreciate you :)
The story moves fast. Huge events happen, little moments happen, all the while it keeps moving forward, rolling along, like the neverending calendar-page-flips of life itself, which is I think what the book is about. It's about friends growing up, and growing apart, and having to live in themselves in the day which contains all the days you've had to live through before. The rolling pace makes it feel almost like the cliff's notes to the saga of a group of friends' dissolving ties. Which is really kind of depressing, in a "The Adventures of Milo and Otis" kind of way. That movie really depressed the hell out of me when I was a kid, going around compressing the whole journey of life (birth-childhood-friendships-adolescence-love-coupling-copulating-birthing-growing old) into eighty minutes narrated by the great Dudley Moore.
So basically, Dudley Moore can tell you every major stage of your life through an allegory with dogs in eighty minutes, and Ben Tanzer can map out for you the disconnect that happens in so many groups of friends with archetypes that are actually real characters in 220 pages. Life is simple, and that's depressing.
But also kind of beautiful in it's reassurance for the things we do that we wish we could re-do, the things that we did't know how to do that we had to, and on and on and on. The lessons we had to learn, and now have to live with. It captures that late-teens-into-twenties-what-the-fuck-is-going-on-here-people-paradigm-shift that we all have to claw through.
What ads to the bigger-than-itself feeling of the book is how we don't ever really get to know many specific details about the setting. But we sense it: small town, maybe a 'burb - but it could be many settings.
Each character, even the ones who aren't as naturally introspective, are respected and given their due. You like 'em all, you feel for 'em all. You feel like you know them all intimately.
As for the actual printing - there are some typos, but I mean, really - it's a small press book. These things happen, and it's not like we can't figure out when "their" should be "there". We're grown-ups, after all. Yeah, it would be better if those typos weren't there, but they are, and the book is what it is, and it's pretty damn good! Plus, I'd give Manx Media extra props for the cover art, which is so often sadly lackluster on small press books, but here is fantastic and sums up the feel of the book before you even know what it is.
So, this is a pretty great book about friends sitting by as each other drown in the depths of despair and die in one way or another one by one, too afraid too acknowledge what they need before it's too late. It's about how unspoken care and love lead to doubts and rifts and frustration and fights and really we all just want and need to be told that we're appreciated by our friends, but at the same time often we're afraid to tell people we appreciate them, maybe because we're afraid they don't feel the same way and that we're weird or something, or that they do but they won't say it like we almost didn't - and how that can lead to bad things and it can get really sad and fucked up when people are changing but still have those ties to what they were.
So one thing I took out of this book is that you just have to say when you appreciate things, old friends and new friends alike. The book inspired me to call up an old friend who needed a call - a call I'd been putting off.
Lucky Man, I appreciate you :)
October 23, 2008
This is a book about four friends, Gabe, Jake, Louie and Sammy, following their last years in school/college; however, it is not only a book for teenagers. I think everyone, young and old, will enjoy reading this book. It is a book about growing up, relationships, family problems and teenage social behaviour. The writing style is unconventional - there are no quotation marks used to signify speech, which first seems very unusual, but once you get used to it, doesn't seem that bad. Each chapter is written from the perspective of one of the four main characters, however, the author doesn't make it clear which character is narrating and so you have to work it out as you read. I found this a bit confusing, especially at the beginning of the book when the characters were unfamiliar, but as you get to know each character this becomes less distracting. However, given the way the book ends, it may well be that the author intended some confusion in the way the book was written; after all, the story does centre around the four boys' misuse of various drugs and the mind altering potential of these. I did find the book an entertaining read and would recommend it to anyone looking for a good book to read. There were a few typos contained in the book which kept recurring which is why I am only giving it four stars, otherwise I think it was almost perfect. It reminded me in parts of 'A Catcher in the Rye' with the same loose style of writing. JD Salinger's infamous book is mentioned a couple of times in the novel and so maybe it was one of the author's influences in writing this novel.
October 4, 2008
Structurally similar to Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, or Dills’s Sons of the Rapture contemporarily speaking, Ben Tanzer’s debut novel Lucky Man (Manx Media, 2007) splits the narration among the four chief characters, who are otherwise known as Gabe, Jake, Louie, and Sammy. And as the back of the book aptly puts it, “Lucky Man follows four friends from their final days of high school through their first couple of years out of college. Each has personal demons they are battling – anger, substance abuse, sexual identity, and detachment.” Most of their travails appear to stem from father/son relationships gone awry, and by the end, only one is left standing....
Read the rest in the July 2007 issue of decomP .
Read the rest in the July 2007 issue of decomP .
May 10, 2013
It's suddenly amusing me that I'm trying to wrap my head around a book centering on the lives of four guys who epitomize how we spend our entire lives hopelessly trying to wrap our heads around what the heck we're doing and what our lives mean. Regardless, I dug this book. I dug the characters, the interrelation both between them and their internal problems, and the way that this was manifested in the structure of the book. There are some absolutely stunning moments, at least partially from how Tanzer lets the characters sometimes relate what happens deadpan so that the emotion ends up just bleeding from the page. It has some amazing, bare soul...but don't let some of the early unadorned style mislead you that there aren't complex things at play here. They're coming, and it'll hit you hard. Before I go on too long here, let's just say this is some fine writing and leave it at that.
Read
February 12, 2008It is funny, but also sad and strange and surprising and many other engaging ‘S’ words. I was especially impressed by his range of emotion and for his clever plotting. As the novel went from coming-of-age to On the Road-like road trip, I was happy to bum along, expecting it to end in the requisite literary epiphany, but I was excited by the deft turn in the book’s conclusion. Lucky Man makes me eager for more from Tanzer.
January 1, 2015
Mr. Tanzer's such a nice guy...can't give a "bad review" on any of his books. I thought of this book as a "Stand by Me" with curse words. Get past those bleeping words, and the story rolls merrily along.
June 18, 2016
Very strange book, very well written and quite interesting. My main problem with it is its bleakness and a view throughout the book that borders with lack of humanity and respect for life.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews