The Planets

by James Boylan

Lovesick Edith Schmertz's leap out of an airplane has fateful implications for a married bank president romancing an office temp, a little girl whose birthday is turned upside down by a pet rabbit, and a family kidnapped by a hardware-store bandit

Genres: Fiction, Humor, Literature

Hardcover

First published April 1, 1991

Reviews

[🐴 🍖]

a twin peaks comparison is not unwarranted here i think, & to be clear i don't mean just strange sinister things happening but rather the interplay b/w strange sinister events and melodrama -- you've got your pet rabbit thrown thru a window, sure, but also a cop who's haunted by the smell of his late wife's melted plastic rain hat. the former wouldn't be so unsettling in the absence of the latter, nor would the latter be so poignant absent the former. (& then as a 3rd element just uncategorizable fish-in-percolator style weirdness, like the outcast's mother's signature cocktail, the "irish listerine" -- coffee w/ listerine & whipped cream.) looks deceptively pretentious at 1st (it's structured after the holst symphony for pete's sake), but proves to be warm & welcoming, toxic mine gases & all

[Ashley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cohesive chaos. Depressing hilarity. It's interesting, knowing that James truly was Jenny all along, to observe the duplicity the author creates for her characters. I read The Planets after picking She's Not There up for the first time since my human sexuality class in college. Finney Boylan writes poignantly with a dry and searing sense of humor and ease. This may be the fastest I have ever read a novel. I plan to devour anything and everything I can find by her.

[Charity · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of those novels where no coincidence is too extreme, where characters from one chapter drop in out of the blue (literally) in the next, and where time has a wonderful elasticity that brings random events together in a sort of cosmic interrelatedness that suggests the movement of the planets. Out of print.

[Kevin Tole · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very funny and well written book. Laughing out loud hilariously funny in the juxtaposition of accidents, occurences, serendip etc etc. And very well written.

Set in Centralia, Pennsylvania where an underground coal fire started in 1962 from the surface and is projected to continue burning for another 250 years.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you like dark humor, you will love this book! I laughed out loud at least twice each chapter. However, when I would read the hysterical passages to my partner she didn't even crack a smile. You REALLY have to like dark humor to enjoy this book. Each adventure is totally absurd, and yet, you find yourself saying, "well, that could happen." Having read She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders, I was eager to learn more about Jennifer/James writing. I loved this book and can't wait to read the sequel: The Constellations.

[Lacey · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not much for absurdist humor but this was a pretty fun read. It was more "silly" than truly absurd. But that also made the pacing slow--it felt like it was just a book to be humorous and I didn't care much how the plot went or what happened with the characters.

[Trish · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm usually turned off by overt quirk, but I enjoyed this tale of a skydiver who falls through a roof, interrupting a mime's tryst. There's always a logic to the quirk, a matter-of-factness -- the characters aren't ostentatiously precious about their quirks, they just are who they are.

[Antonio · Rating 5 out of 5]

Funny book. Had my fair share of laughs. Along with it, a captivating story which continues to build up and come together as it goes along

[Robert Natale · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too clever by half.

[Michael Norwitz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Purportedly humorous novel, very 1980s style of narrative, featuring a random collection of stupid white people. I tired of it long before the last page but managed to bull my way through.

[Craig · Rating 5 out of 5]

Goes all the ways that surprise and delight. Wonderful, weird characters inhabiting a wonderful, weird space.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

I put this book on my to-read list years ago after seeing something about it being a novel set in Centralia, the central Pennsylvania town that is largely abandoned because of a coal-mine fire that's been burning underneath the town since 1962. The author's name didn't register for me at the time, but when I went to check The Planets out from the library I discovered that it isn't just some one-off novelty book about a wacky locale - the author has since become far more famous for She's Not There.

The Planets is beautifully written and engaging, and it manages to be a book in which every character is deeply weird without, for the most part, feeling forced. Funny things happen, and a couple of the characters do skew a little too caricature-ish, but everything is just a little too sad or world-weary for The Planets to be a "funny book." We get a chance to see inside most of the characters' heads, and almost all of them are more complex than their friends, neighbors, and families give them credit for.

I went into this book without much more than curiosity to see what an author would do with Centralia as their location, and ended up getting totally sucked in. I haven't read anything else from Jennifer Finney Boylan yet, but I look forward to reading both She's Not There and more of her fiction soon.

[emperorcupcake · Rating 5 out of 5]

Re-reading an old fave I haven't read since the late 90s. Wild. This book so 100% exemplifies who I was at that time, my taste, my humour. While I and my reading taste have changed somewhat, this still hit. Especially the absurdist humour. It's something that's so hard to get right and I think this book gets it. I'm pretty sure I read this back in the day bc it was recommended for fans of Douglas Adams, and that makes sense. This is general fiction, not sci fi, but the humour hits similarly. Fans of T. Kingfisher might enjoy this as well. And Kevin Wilson.

This is also the book that started my lifelong obsession with Centralia, and abandoned towns and mines in general. I love a book like this that throws in little offhand comments like "If life was going to be so stupid, it might at least have been enjoyable." A little bit of relatability amidst the chaos and absurdity. That's the key for this kind of book to work.

I've been wanting to re-read this ever since I enjoyed Mad Honey a couple years ago. I hadn't kept up with this author, and seeing her with such a popular book after 25 years was so cool! This would be more like a 4.5 if I read it for the first time now, but this was such a "me" book back in the day that I'm keeping it at 5 stars.

[jess · Rating 3 out of 5]

I started reading this book as part of my recent obsession with Centralia, Pennsylvania. This is a small town that has been home to underground burning coal mines since 1962. Much of the town has been bought out and bulldozed by the government. Oh, this is the nonfiction right here. It is stranger, indeed, than the fiction.

Secondarily, I read this book because it is the work of a trans lady, and it is not about transsexuals! Sometimes transsexuals can write about things that don't have anything to do with being a transsexual. I know, it might be hard to believe this, but she does it!


I like the quirky characters, the weird ways their weird lives tangle and untangle and tangle. it's a little predictable, and the plot relies too much on the weirdness of the setting & characters to push the story along, but the faults are forgivable. Some of the more subtle metaphors and obscure gestures were lost on me. One more thing, the cumulative weirdness made it sometimes difficult to suspend my disbelief and fall into the story, but when I found myself believing in the Outcast robbing banks with a burro, it was pretty magical.

[Evan Gregg · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fast read. The plot is almost too clever at times and I often felt like I knew where it was going long before it got there. The author managed to surprise me a few times though. The characters while definitely "quirky" weren't limited or defined by their quirks. Some went deeper than others but they all felt alive and I can see why he wrote a sequel for a few.
Not sure about the whole planets theme and the structure is supposedly based around some piece of music I don't know so I can't comment on that. It doesn't get in the way and if you were so inclined I'm sure you could use it to analyze it. I just like being carried along by the plot and the occasional bursts of playful language and interesting ideas about relationships and personal interactions.
Overall, probably not worth hunting too hard for (it's out of print) but definitely worth picking up cheap.
Oh, for the record it turns out that James Finney Boylan is now JENNIFER Finney Boylan and now writes memoirs and articles and appears on talk shows.

[Chloe · Rating 5 out of 5]

**This is one of my favourite books.**

The Planets is a fantastic mixture of funny and bizarre. I mean really really funny and really really bizarre*. I winced, I cracked up, laughed out loud, etc. I love how all the crazy random people and events all managed to come together in the end.

(The sequel is not quite as good, but still good.)

My edition is an older one, so the author is listed as James Finney Boylan.

* Demmie gives herself a shaving cream beard and plays electric guitar. Billings covers himself in newspapers to disguise himself as a ghost, but decides he'd better cut a mouth-hole so he can still sip his beer.

[Sari Lynn · Rating 3 out of 5]

A wild and wacky romp through a small town in Pennsylvania. The characters are an odd bunch of misfits, including a police officer in a wizards cape, an ex-con known as "The Outcast" who has a penchant for holding up hardware stores on donkey-back, a legal secretary who dislikes wearing clothes, and a batty old woman living in an abandoned school.

Boylan writes well. If you like the off beat, you will enjoy this book.

[Helen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a super weird book. I read it because I'd been to Centralia in Pensylvannia and this book is set there. Centralia is a small town that is built on a coal mine, which caught fire and burned for AGES. The book is about some kind of weird relationships, and some strange goings on, not entirely sure what it is about actually - read it a long time ago. The second book in the series is less understandable and I think I (literally) lost the plot! Perhaps I missed something.

[Ellen Shull · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wackiness ensues. If you've read any of Boylan's other books, you know what I'm talking about. Sometimes the pacing was a bit off, and I can't say I really I related that well to the various "everyman" sorts that populated the book, but there were more than enough clever situations and turns of phrase to make up for it.

[Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the funniest books I have read (back in the mid 90's). Found it on a library shelf when I had run out of JG Ballard books to read and thought it looked interesting. I tried to look it up years later and found out that James had become a she after he originally wrote it - I have not read any of her other works but if they are as good as this one then I am in for a real treat.

[Catheryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book needs to be made into a movie! It would be a hoot and a hit! James Finney Boylan is my favorite author and he is brilliant at character development. I actually missed the characters after I finished the book and I have enjoyed this book each time I read it. Now if I could only get it signed!

[Patty Simpson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book ages ago and while I couldn't remember the name or author, I've never forgotten some of the characters and events in it. Someone on goodreads managed to figure out what it was, from my description. I remember enjoying it quite a bit - think I'm going to try to get my hands on a copy and read it again.

[Jess Moss · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jennifer Finney Boylan (or James Finney Boylan on the older copy that I own) certainly comes up with interesting characters! This was an entertaining light read. Nothing profound about it, but very amusing characters.

[Leslie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyable screwball story.

[Jess · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bizarre, engaging, at times very funny despite sad situations. Very intricate and deeply imagined.

[Adina · Rating 4 out of 5]

As I grew up outside Philly, the scenes in familiar locations always tend to resonate. =) Phoebe Rocks!

[Jennifer · Rating 2 out of 5]

Cute, clever and occasionally funny.

[Sophie K · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's raining non sequiturs.