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Against the Country
Against the Country is a gift for fans of Southern Gothic and metafiction alike. Set in the Virginia pines, and overrun with failed parents, racist sex offenders, cast-off priests, and suicidal chickens, this novel challenges literary convention even as it attacks our national myth—that the rural naturally engenders good, while the urban breeds an inevitable sin.
In a voice both perfectly American and utterly new, Metcalf introduces the reader to Goochland County, Virginia—a land of stubborn soil, voracious insects, lackluster farms, and horrifying trees—and details one family’s pitiful struggle to survive there. Eventually it becomes clear that Goochland is not merely the author’s setting; it is a growing, throbbing menace that warps and scars every one of his characters’ lives.
Equal parts fiery criticism and icy farce, Against the Country is the most hilarious sermon one is likely to hear on the subject of our native soil, and the starkest celebration of the language our land produced. The result is a literary tour de force that raises the question: Was there ever a narrator, in all our literature, so precise, so far-reaching, so eloquently misanthropic, as the one encountered here?
In a voice both perfectly American and utterly new, Metcalf introduces the reader to Goochland County, Virginia—a land of stubborn soil, voracious insects, lackluster farms, and horrifying trees—and details one family’s pitiful struggle to survive there. Eventually it becomes clear that Goochland is not merely the author’s setting; it is a growing, throbbing menace that warps and scars every one of his characters’ lives.
Equal parts fiery criticism and icy farce, Against the Country is the most hilarious sermon one is likely to hear on the subject of our native soil, and the starkest celebration of the language our land produced. The result is a literary tour de force that raises the question: Was there ever a narrator, in all our literature, so precise, so far-reaching, so eloquently misanthropic, as the one encountered here?
328 pages, Hardcover
First published October 7, 2014
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January 6, 2015
The publisher describes Ben Metcalf’s “Against the Country” as a “gift for fans of Southern Gothic and metafiction,” which sounds like a final exam question for Venn diagrammers. Having survived this mind-numbing rant of a novel, I only know that it’s a gift I would not open again.
And yet I entered these dark woods eagerly. For many years, Metcalf was the literary editor of Harper’s, where he published some of the finest writers in the world and, a few times, offered his own essays in that magazine and in the Baffler. They were remarkable performances: angry, erudite pieces delivered in a comically pompous voice that mocked its own pretensions. In 1998, his hysterical assault on “that shallow and putrid trough we call the Mississippi River” opened with the line, “I proceed from rage.” In 2006, he attracted notice (and opprobrium) for an essay that considered the legal and moral complications of expressing a hypothetical desire to kill President George W. Bush with his bare hands.
In that same essay, he wrote, “Literary taste does not seem to have advanced much . . . and I assume is still arrayed so as to engage only the weak-minded and dull.” It was a comment calibrated to flatter readers who knew he was kidding and not kidding, who fall asleep snuggling tattered back issues of Lingua Franca.
Now, after years of rumors about his novel in progress, “Against the Country” has arrived, and — as expected — it’s unlikely to engage the weak-minded and dull. Or possibly anyone else.
And yet, the opening pages are joltingly brilliant. I hounded my wife around the house, declaiming Metcalf’s seething sentences like an intoxicated Jonathan Edwards: “I was worked like a jackass for the worst part of my childhood, and offered up to climate and predator and vice, and introduced to solitude, and braced against hope, and dangled before the Lord our God, and schooled in the subtle truths and blatant lies of a half life in the American countryside, all because my parents did not trust that I would mature to their specifications in town.”
That demonic grammar, diagrammed in hell; that cerebral fury, stoked for years: I felt as if my eyebrows were being burned off. In short chapters of two or three pages, the unnamed narrator proceeds from rage through “this frail and too bloodless composition,” which he presents to us as an act of revenge. Everything went wrong, he claims, in the 1970s, when in a fit of misguided fervor, his father moved their family from southern Illinois to Goochland, “a desolate Virginia county at the foot of the Piedmont Plateau, to the east of Jefferson’s labor camp.” (Metcalf’s early life followed that trajectory, too.) Enticed to this “desolate slough,” he and his family rot and go mad. They have been misled — like generations of others — by the old “agrarian delusion” that God waits for us in the Edenic countryside. “The public-broadcasting set,” he writes bitterly, as he writes everything, “never tires of the conceit that one can look out over America’s hills and through her swamps and forests, and across her valleys and plains and deserts, and sense in those features a presence far greater than one’s own.”
As a dramatic essay, this Sherman’s March on pastoralism is as awesome as it is devastating. “To my mind,” the narrator says in the weirdly archaic diction that marks this novel, “he who turns his back on town is as prone as anyone to become evil’s eager and ignorant sponge.” Moving erratically through history, literature and his own tragedies, Metcalf lines up Thomas Jefferson, Daniel Boone, James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, even E.B. White for execution. They’re all “ madmen or liars”; they’re all to blame for his unending suffering on a cold comfort farm: “So it was that we stumbled into the country life like an infant who takes his first astonished steps and then, as his frightened grin dissolves, reaches out to catch himself against the side of a red-hot wood stove.”
And yet, for a reader, the question quickly becomes: How long can I listen to this clever crank who claims that “pain and pretense and foolishness [are] the only themes still available to the honest American writer”? A large collection of classic novels rotting in his father’s barn is just one of many not-so-subtle intimations about the health of contemporary fiction. He’s constantly poking us in the eye with the unreliability of memoir or the indeterminacy of narrative, which is awfully dry meal for those of us not stuck in graduate school. Several chapters are given over to an inane critique of his father’s critique of J.D. Salinger. There’s one chapter of paragraphs all encased in parentheses. “Enough! Enough with asides,” he says (too late for me). In another chapter, footnotes pile up like warring ants. Sentences regularly run on for many hundreds of words, punctuated with repeated phrases. We’re made to climb through an endless series of redundant and self-conscious riffs about his own prose, such as this constipated passage:
“(My father the teacher might insist upon a ‘those who’ there, and also back in the last paragraph of the eighth part of my third attempt to end all this (not to mention the third paragraph of the eleventh part of my second, nor forgetting the second paragraph of the sixth part of my fifth, or is it now the seventh part of my sixth?), but the builder in him would at least acknowledge that the sentiment is right, and so perhaps also the sound.)”
And yet there are characters — an older brother, a younger sister, his cruel and misguided parents. The problem is that they move only behind the rough burlap curtain of this narrator’s voice. He never stops complaining about his father’s violence or his father’s unreasonable orders or his father’s nonsensical rules long enough to let the old man breathe. “He is better thought of as an effigy I stuff and sew,” the narrator says, “so that I might whack at him with the sticks of my sentences.” And so, whack away he does, chapter after chapter ((after chapter) after chapter).
Without any dependable sense of chronology, elements of plot are subsumed beneath the narrator’s diatribes. Jane Eyre’s life is an idyllic summer camp in comparison with what this young man endures, holed up in his freezing attic room with wasps, ticks, rats. We get snippets of incidents, related as though they were testimonies of war crimes: picking blackberries, riding the school bus, cutting wood — all slathered with condemnation for his crude schoolmates, his brutal father or his stupid teachers. There’s a chapter about how much he “feared the corn.”(Don’t ask.) There are several surreal and violent chapters about his chickens, who are personified more than any of the human beings in this story. (And like every other self-conscious gag here, this one is pecked to death.)
“I will take such measures as are necessary to secure myself a pulpit,” the narrator thunders, but securing a pulpit is easier than securing a congregation. How many rhetorical poses and stylistic gags can one endure through this misanthropic critique of American culture? Metcalf acolytes — some big names in the literary world blurb this novel — will point to a number of dazzling passages, but lined up one after another (after another), the comedy curdles in these anaerobic pages. My initial enthusiasm eventually turned into dread until reading “Against the Country” felt, in the final stretch, as enjoyable as flossing with barbed wire.
In a postmodern “Note on the Text,” Metcalf writes, “Better to hate at the end of a book . . . than to love.”
Mission accomplished.
This review first appeared in The Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/enterta...
And yet I entered these dark woods eagerly. For many years, Metcalf was the literary editor of Harper’s, where he published some of the finest writers in the world and, a few times, offered his own essays in that magazine and in the Baffler. They were remarkable performances: angry, erudite pieces delivered in a comically pompous voice that mocked its own pretensions. In 1998, his hysterical assault on “that shallow and putrid trough we call the Mississippi River” opened with the line, “I proceed from rage.” In 2006, he attracted notice (and opprobrium) for an essay that considered the legal and moral complications of expressing a hypothetical desire to kill President George W. Bush with his bare hands.
In that same essay, he wrote, “Literary taste does not seem to have advanced much . . . and I assume is still arrayed so as to engage only the weak-minded and dull.” It was a comment calibrated to flatter readers who knew he was kidding and not kidding, who fall asleep snuggling tattered back issues of Lingua Franca.
Now, after years of rumors about his novel in progress, “Against the Country” has arrived, and — as expected — it’s unlikely to engage the weak-minded and dull. Or possibly anyone else.
And yet, the opening pages are joltingly brilliant. I hounded my wife around the house, declaiming Metcalf’s seething sentences like an intoxicated Jonathan Edwards: “I was worked like a jackass for the worst part of my childhood, and offered up to climate and predator and vice, and introduced to solitude, and braced against hope, and dangled before the Lord our God, and schooled in the subtle truths and blatant lies of a half life in the American countryside, all because my parents did not trust that I would mature to their specifications in town.”
That demonic grammar, diagrammed in hell; that cerebral fury, stoked for years: I felt as if my eyebrows were being burned off. In short chapters of two or three pages, the unnamed narrator proceeds from rage through “this frail and too bloodless composition,” which he presents to us as an act of revenge. Everything went wrong, he claims, in the 1970s, when in a fit of misguided fervor, his father moved their family from southern Illinois to Goochland, “a desolate Virginia county at the foot of the Piedmont Plateau, to the east of Jefferson’s labor camp.” (Metcalf’s early life followed that trajectory, too.) Enticed to this “desolate slough,” he and his family rot and go mad. They have been misled — like generations of others — by the old “agrarian delusion” that God waits for us in the Edenic countryside. “The public-broadcasting set,” he writes bitterly, as he writes everything, “never tires of the conceit that one can look out over America’s hills and through her swamps and forests, and across her valleys and plains and deserts, and sense in those features a presence far greater than one’s own.”
As a dramatic essay, this Sherman’s March on pastoralism is as awesome as it is devastating. “To my mind,” the narrator says in the weirdly archaic diction that marks this novel, “he who turns his back on town is as prone as anyone to become evil’s eager and ignorant sponge.” Moving erratically through history, literature and his own tragedies, Metcalf lines up Thomas Jefferson, Daniel Boone, James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, even E.B. White for execution. They’re all “ madmen or liars”; they’re all to blame for his unending suffering on a cold comfort farm: “So it was that we stumbled into the country life like an infant who takes his first astonished steps and then, as his frightened grin dissolves, reaches out to catch himself against the side of a red-hot wood stove.”
And yet, for a reader, the question quickly becomes: How long can I listen to this clever crank who claims that “pain and pretense and foolishness [are] the only themes still available to the honest American writer”? A large collection of classic novels rotting in his father’s barn is just one of many not-so-subtle intimations about the health of contemporary fiction. He’s constantly poking us in the eye with the unreliability of memoir or the indeterminacy of narrative, which is awfully dry meal for those of us not stuck in graduate school. Several chapters are given over to an inane critique of his father’s critique of J.D. Salinger. There’s one chapter of paragraphs all encased in parentheses. “Enough! Enough with asides,” he says (too late for me). In another chapter, footnotes pile up like warring ants. Sentences regularly run on for many hundreds of words, punctuated with repeated phrases. We’re made to climb through an endless series of redundant and self-conscious riffs about his own prose, such as this constipated passage:
“(My father the teacher might insist upon a ‘those who’ there, and also back in the last paragraph of the eighth part of my third attempt to end all this (not to mention the third paragraph of the eleventh part of my second, nor forgetting the second paragraph of the sixth part of my fifth, or is it now the seventh part of my sixth?), but the builder in him would at least acknowledge that the sentiment is right, and so perhaps also the sound.)”
And yet there are characters — an older brother, a younger sister, his cruel and misguided parents. The problem is that they move only behind the rough burlap curtain of this narrator’s voice. He never stops complaining about his father’s violence or his father’s unreasonable orders or his father’s nonsensical rules long enough to let the old man breathe. “He is better thought of as an effigy I stuff and sew,” the narrator says, “so that I might whack at him with the sticks of my sentences.” And so, whack away he does, chapter after chapter ((after chapter) after chapter).
Without any dependable sense of chronology, elements of plot are subsumed beneath the narrator’s diatribes. Jane Eyre’s life is an idyllic summer camp in comparison with what this young man endures, holed up in his freezing attic room with wasps, ticks, rats. We get snippets of incidents, related as though they were testimonies of war crimes: picking blackberries, riding the school bus, cutting wood — all slathered with condemnation for his crude schoolmates, his brutal father or his stupid teachers. There’s a chapter about how much he “feared the corn.”(Don’t ask.) There are several surreal and violent chapters about his chickens, who are personified more than any of the human beings in this story. (And like every other self-conscious gag here, this one is pecked to death.)
“I will take such measures as are necessary to secure myself a pulpit,” the narrator thunders, but securing a pulpit is easier than securing a congregation. How many rhetorical poses and stylistic gags can one endure through this misanthropic critique of American culture? Metcalf acolytes — some big names in the literary world blurb this novel — will point to a number of dazzling passages, but lined up one after another (after another), the comedy curdles in these anaerobic pages. My initial enthusiasm eventually turned into dread until reading “Against the Country” felt, in the final stretch, as enjoyable as flossing with barbed wire.
In a postmodern “Note on the Text,” Metcalf writes, “Better to hate at the end of a book . . . than to love.”
Mission accomplished.
This review first appeared in The Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/enterta...
July 16, 2015
Boy this guy really hates his dad
March 29, 2015
I now know why this book has a 2.48 average rating on GR. I can't do it.
September 24, 2024
contains some of the most sustained and spiteful hating i've ever read, and only somewhat loses steam later on in the book where the narrator becomes especially fixated on his father's poorly thought out criticism of jd salinger and the ailments of the family chickens. the opening chapters where he is denouncing the very concept of rural america are particularly good:
"As an accomplice to this scheme, and perhaps a principal in it, Thomas Jefferson seems to me to have sinned cardinally, with his comfortable slaver’s dream of an agrarian wonderland and his criminal transfer of public funds to the Napoleonic war effort so as to avail us of the hectares needed to prove that dream a nightmare. I also hold accountable Daniel Boone, first realtor through the Cumberland Gap; and Fenimore Cooper, whose salesmanship of the prairie and the waterways as a playground for white boys continues to plague us with foreign-exchange students and unwatchable Hollywood films; and Mr. Greeley, who encouraged the young to believe that a westward trek would not, in fact, kill a number of them outright and deliver the rest into penury; and Mr. Audubon, whose still lifes do little to indicate that actual birds flap around overly much and tend to spread influenzas; and Messrs. Alcott and Lane and Emerson and Thoreau, who were not satisfied that the land should be thought benevolent and wise but sought also to equate these ludicrous properties with the American soul; and Senator Calhoun, who damned the nation to Armageddon (though he would not live to enjoy the scene) with his fantasy that somewhere between the smug agribusiness of the plantation and the observable grief of the tenant farm was to be found a “way of life” whose protection was worth the risk (and, as it turned out, the reality) of death and dismemberment and subjugation."
he also has this rather novel description of catching a school bus:
"I wonder: When the great root below us inspired in Thomas Jefferson his idyllic hallucinations, and began to grow its system westward under the Appalachian range (toward the Mississippi snake oil it would require in order to reach and pervert California), did it bestow upon him a vision of the roving metal stomach that would, a century and change after his presidency, gobble up the nation’s schoolchildren by law each morning and vomit them into a freshly graveled parking lot? Did he understand that whereas this process would inflict upon the town child no more than a momentary and perhaps even a healthy terror, it would prove for the rural child a journey so drawn out and confined with the personality flaws of his peers as to allow for the partial birth of those communities his shacks and his farmhouses had tried and failed to form? Was the architect of the American dirt clod aware that these mobile townships would exhibit none of the grace and wholesomeness he had predicted for his agricultural societies, and would in fact be predicated on a hatred of self and surrounds, and would be policed no better than the shacks and the farmhouses themselves? (which, after all, stayed in one place, or appeared to.) Did he know, or care, that the introduction of such a predator into the Virginia hills would ensure that I received my first nonfamilial Virginia whipping, and enough thereafter to make me question my assumption that Virginia homes were to be got away from whenever possible, long before a Virginia schoolhouse had even come into view?"
"As an accomplice to this scheme, and perhaps a principal in it, Thomas Jefferson seems to me to have sinned cardinally, with his comfortable slaver’s dream of an agrarian wonderland and his criminal transfer of public funds to the Napoleonic war effort so as to avail us of the hectares needed to prove that dream a nightmare. I also hold accountable Daniel Boone, first realtor through the Cumberland Gap; and Fenimore Cooper, whose salesmanship of the prairie and the waterways as a playground for white boys continues to plague us with foreign-exchange students and unwatchable Hollywood films; and Mr. Greeley, who encouraged the young to believe that a westward trek would not, in fact, kill a number of them outright and deliver the rest into penury; and Mr. Audubon, whose still lifes do little to indicate that actual birds flap around overly much and tend to spread influenzas; and Messrs. Alcott and Lane and Emerson and Thoreau, who were not satisfied that the land should be thought benevolent and wise but sought also to equate these ludicrous properties with the American soul; and Senator Calhoun, who damned the nation to Armageddon (though he would not live to enjoy the scene) with his fantasy that somewhere between the smug agribusiness of the plantation and the observable grief of the tenant farm was to be found a “way of life” whose protection was worth the risk (and, as it turned out, the reality) of death and dismemberment and subjugation."
he also has this rather novel description of catching a school bus:
"I wonder: When the great root below us inspired in Thomas Jefferson his idyllic hallucinations, and began to grow its system westward under the Appalachian range (toward the Mississippi snake oil it would require in order to reach and pervert California), did it bestow upon him a vision of the roving metal stomach that would, a century and change after his presidency, gobble up the nation’s schoolchildren by law each morning and vomit them into a freshly graveled parking lot? Did he understand that whereas this process would inflict upon the town child no more than a momentary and perhaps even a healthy terror, it would prove for the rural child a journey so drawn out and confined with the personality flaws of his peers as to allow for the partial birth of those communities his shacks and his farmhouses had tried and failed to form? Was the architect of the American dirt clod aware that these mobile townships would exhibit none of the grace and wholesomeness he had predicted for his agricultural societies, and would in fact be predicated on a hatred of self and surrounds, and would be policed no better than the shacks and the farmhouses themselves? (which, after all, stayed in one place, or appeared to.) Did he know, or care, that the introduction of such a predator into the Virginia hills would ensure that I received my first nonfamilial Virginia whipping, and enough thereafter to make me question my assumption that Virginia homes were to be got away from whenever possible, long before a Virginia schoolhouse had even come into view?"
March 3, 2015
Okay, so this book is definitely not one that everyone is going to like for sure, but I just loved it. This is one of the most bitter narrators I've had the pleasure of being guided by, and the ebb and flow of his 300 plus page diatribe is something to behold. If you just let yourself go and don't have any expectations plot-wise, you may find this a very rewarding read.
April 10, 2015
this novel (based on a true story of the 1970's-2000's? and written in a 19th cent. style) chronicles a boy's experiences living in "the country" when his parents move his family to a farm (of sorts) in Piedmont virginia, goochland, hah!. so chopping wood, hoeing corn, feeding chickens, killing snakes, in other words, a jeffersonian hell jefferson himself bought slaves to do for him. also, it's a diatribe of the most vicious, morbid and longwinded kind against: living in the country, chopping wood, hoeing corn....going to school, living around rednecks, church, fathers, usa, sex, dogs, hunters, rats, siblings, school buses, jobs, memories.....
the most personable and humane characters are chickens and the vultures who eat all the dead this family produces and throws up top of the chicken house (which stored his dad's huge library of wonderful literature, but was mostly left to rot). i shit you not.
one wonders about ben's "real" family dynamics, i worry about them, really. i hope he and his family and loved ones are all right. this novel makes you care that much.
laugh and laugh and laugh-outloud prose while the pall of grotesque hate and poe-like horror builds and builds and builds. this book is either for you, or should be left in the chicken house shelves.
see ron charles ' brilliant book review for more details. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
the most personable and humane characters are chickens and the vultures who eat all the dead this family produces and throws up top of the chicken house (which stored his dad's huge library of wonderful literature, but was mostly left to rot). i shit you not.
one wonders about ben's "real" family dynamics, i worry about them, really. i hope he and his family and loved ones are all right. this novel makes you care that much.
laugh and laugh and laugh-outloud prose while the pall of grotesque hate and poe-like horror builds and builds and builds. this book is either for you, or should be left in the chicken house shelves.
see ron charles ' brilliant book review for more details. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
February 2, 2015
A couple of chapters in, I began to refer to this book in my head as "the unholy love child of James Joyce and Donald Ray Pollock". It is also full of vicious, Menckenesque hyperbole! I'm not sure what that all says, but in any event I actually really liked this book.
The writing is very technical and self-aware throughout, so it will not appeal to everyone, but the style is an interesting and surprisingly effective choice for the subject matter. Metcalf is unpretentious about being pretentious, if that makes sense, and is great a painting a vivid picture of the things about which he/his narrator writes. It loses its way a little bit a times, particularly in "Book 6", but ultimately comes back around.
I'm sorry to see that many reviews of this book have not been kind so far. I'm sure it'll be very divisive. But I for one feel like I stretched my brain, learned something (but what? What?), and went on a strange journey. I was somehow sorry when it was over.
** I received a Review Copy of this book via NetGalley **
The writing is very technical and self-aware throughout, so it will not appeal to everyone, but the style is an interesting and surprisingly effective choice for the subject matter. Metcalf is unpretentious about being pretentious, if that makes sense, and is great a painting a vivid picture of the things about which he/his narrator writes. It loses its way a little bit a times, particularly in "Book 6", but ultimately comes back around.
I'm sorry to see that many reviews of this book have not been kind so far. I'm sure it'll be very divisive. But I for one feel like I stretched my brain, learned something (but what? What?), and went on a strange journey. I was somehow sorry when it was over.
** I received a Review Copy of this book via NetGalley **
May 28, 2017
This is a polarizing book. Readers seem to either love it or hate it. No shame in that. Play to your strengths, Mr. Metcalf. I happen to love it. I listened to it on audio and it hit me like a brick. I laughed out loud and pumped my fist in the air and thumped the steering wheel in my car at every hilariously scathing turn of a phrase. Ben Metcalf is my kind of writer. I don't much care for gooey sentimental writing that looks back into the past, near or distant, and sighs about how great summer nights as a child were. Fuck that shit. I'm not saying I never had a good time as a kid but I cannot abide romanticizing at the expense of reality. Metcalf's rant or screed or polemic or whatever you want to call this extended tongue lashing of a book strips the paint off the crusty old lie that is the American obsession with "the country". I, for one, enjoyed every moment. I hope he's writing another right now.
September 28, 2015
A little bit like being trapped on an eight-hour Greyhound bus trip through rural America, stuck in a window seat next to a secular, aging punk rock version of Robert Mitchum's character in "Night of the Hunter," who is narrating the passing landscape as you roll along. Kind of great at first, but after a few hours, you're ready for it to be over.
June 7, 2015
Definitely not for everyone. While many images will stick with me, and despite the resonance I often felt in his descriptions of daily life (I spent the school year in the city and summers and holidays on the farm) as well as the mentality that allowed adults to physically attack their children… man! This book is a slog. If you love William Faulkner (I do) or James Joyce (not so much) you'll probably be fine, but if I must work hard to read a book, I expect a LOT.
Sentences go on and on… often so that you've forgotten where you started by the time you get to the period. There's a footnote that not only sprawls across several pages, but engenders its own footnote. This is a book where the author uses the punctuation )?)) correctly. Think about that for a minute. Okay, some of this is tongue in cheek:
"We cherish the little kindnesses, I suppose, in them that are departed. (My father the teacher might insist upon a "those who" there, and also back in the last paragraph of the eighth part of my third attempt to end all this (not to mention the third paragraph of the eleventh part of my second, not forgetting the second paragraph of my fifth, or is it now the seventh part of my sixth?), but the builder in him would at least acknowledge that the sentiment is right, and so perhaps also the sound.) I would follow this notion further, except that I think it a hair too late to introduce so fraught a motif as is kindness into what has thus far been an uncomplicated remembrance of the man." (page 207)
Yes, some good writing in the literary sense and I'll admit he made me smile now and again. It also reminded me why I got into therapy once I grew up and left home. My advice to most readers would be to take it in small bites, as I did, although I typically like to immerse myself and get through a book in a day or two. As an author, I confess I work hard to make the mechanics "invisible" so the reader can simply fall into the story without undue distraction. I am, perhaps, revealing myself as low-brow in finding complaint in masterful writing. Metcalf certainly has credentials, and perhaps the "literary minded" will simply fall in love with this book. But for those looking for simple entertainment… there's entertainment here, but it's not simple. You know the difference between peeling a clementine vs. a valencia orange? Thank goodness my husband brought home a couple of John Sanfords to give me a break.
Sentences go on and on… often so that you've forgotten where you started by the time you get to the period. There's a footnote that not only sprawls across several pages, but engenders its own footnote. This is a book where the author uses the punctuation )?)) correctly. Think about that for a minute. Okay, some of this is tongue in cheek:
"We cherish the little kindnesses, I suppose, in them that are departed. (My father the teacher might insist upon a "those who" there, and also back in the last paragraph of the eighth part of my third attempt to end all this (not to mention the third paragraph of the eleventh part of my second, not forgetting the second paragraph of my fifth, or is it now the seventh part of my sixth?), but the builder in him would at least acknowledge that the sentiment is right, and so perhaps also the sound.) I would follow this notion further, except that I think it a hair too late to introduce so fraught a motif as is kindness into what has thus far been an uncomplicated remembrance of the man." (page 207)
Yes, some good writing in the literary sense and I'll admit he made me smile now and again. It also reminded me why I got into therapy once I grew up and left home. My advice to most readers would be to take it in small bites, as I did, although I typically like to immerse myself and get through a book in a day or two. As an author, I confess I work hard to make the mechanics "invisible" so the reader can simply fall into the story without undue distraction. I am, perhaps, revealing myself as low-brow in finding complaint in masterful writing. Metcalf certainly has credentials, and perhaps the "literary minded" will simply fall in love with this book. But for those looking for simple entertainment… there's entertainment here, but it's not simple. You know the difference between peeling a clementine vs. a valencia orange? Thank goodness my husband brought home a couple of John Sanfords to give me a break.
June 17, 2015
http://www.themaineedge.com/buzz/no-c...
It’s tempting to want our literary offerings to adhere to genre regimentation; easy answers to questions like “What kind of book is it?” make recommendations a lot simpler to make. Efficiently synopsized narratives also contribute to effortless literary discussion.
But sometimes, books that resist quantification both in terms of genre and in terms of narrative can present a magnificent challenge, engaging the reader in a manner in which he or she is unaccustomed.
Ben Metcalf’s “Against the Country” is just such a book. It’s billed by the publisher as a “gift for fans of Southern Gothic and metafiction,” which is as good a description as any, though the book’s complexities ultimately bely even that wide-ranging and vague summation.
Metcalf served as the literary editor of Harper’s for years, curating and contributing to some of the finest wordwork out there. Rumors abounded about a long-gestating novel in progress, and now – finally – it has arrived.
As far as just what “it” is, well…that’s a bit tricky.
Ostensibly, this book is about a young man’s lamentations regarding his life in the country. His ill-informed parents, in an effort to celebrate the nobility of the world beyond the reach of city lights, moved their family from southern Illinois to the vast rural emptiness of Goochland County, Virginia. He – along with his brother and sister – have their lives defined by this unintended consequence-laden decision.
The boy’s life is dominated by the unceasing, free-wheeling and ultimately absurd demands of his father, who relentlessly romanticizes their world of poverty and turmoil. He harvests food that is never eaten, dodges wasps and rats in the attic, swirls within a never-ending spiral of school bus violence and plays God with a rash of chickens.
All this while railing against the supposed superiority of country living.
This narrative description – such as it is – does little justice to the material; the story is largely plotless. Regardless, plot serves more of a secondary purpose here. “Against the Country” is about the prose, the massive pile-ups of words and phrases that come together to form brief two- and three-page-chapters. Metcalf hyperfocuses on moments and aspects, building the macro by way of the micro.
Digression follows digression as the reader is drawn down into Metcalf’s rabbit hole (or snake hole, if you will). Page-long sentences assault the senses with vivid descriptors and unorthodox syntax as the notion of the pastoral life is taken apart and reassembled as a sort of Frankenstein’s farm. And in the end, our narrator ultimately proves to be as detached from reality as his delusional father, albeit in a divergent direction.
There are stretches when the novel is weighed down by its own ambition, however – a few spots when it feels less inspired and more overwrought. Still, these brief low points are more than compensated for by the dizzying heights to which the book aspires; the occasional nadir only serves to point out the far more frequent instances of structural brilliance.
Despite the novel’s plotlessness – or perhaps because of it – it shines through as a triumph of style, an aesthetic marvel. The demands that Metcalf makes are significant and uncompromising, but they merit the effort spent meeting them. “Against the Country” proves itself to be well worth the wait.
It’s tempting to want our literary offerings to adhere to genre regimentation; easy answers to questions like “What kind of book is it?” make recommendations a lot simpler to make. Efficiently synopsized narratives also contribute to effortless literary discussion.
But sometimes, books that resist quantification both in terms of genre and in terms of narrative can present a magnificent challenge, engaging the reader in a manner in which he or she is unaccustomed.
Ben Metcalf’s “Against the Country” is just such a book. It’s billed by the publisher as a “gift for fans of Southern Gothic and metafiction,” which is as good a description as any, though the book’s complexities ultimately bely even that wide-ranging and vague summation.
Metcalf served as the literary editor of Harper’s for years, curating and contributing to some of the finest wordwork out there. Rumors abounded about a long-gestating novel in progress, and now – finally – it has arrived.
As far as just what “it” is, well…that’s a bit tricky.
Ostensibly, this book is about a young man’s lamentations regarding his life in the country. His ill-informed parents, in an effort to celebrate the nobility of the world beyond the reach of city lights, moved their family from southern Illinois to the vast rural emptiness of Goochland County, Virginia. He – along with his brother and sister – have their lives defined by this unintended consequence-laden decision.
The boy’s life is dominated by the unceasing, free-wheeling and ultimately absurd demands of his father, who relentlessly romanticizes their world of poverty and turmoil. He harvests food that is never eaten, dodges wasps and rats in the attic, swirls within a never-ending spiral of school bus violence and plays God with a rash of chickens.
All this while railing against the supposed superiority of country living.
This narrative description – such as it is – does little justice to the material; the story is largely plotless. Regardless, plot serves more of a secondary purpose here. “Against the Country” is about the prose, the massive pile-ups of words and phrases that come together to form brief two- and three-page-chapters. Metcalf hyperfocuses on moments and aspects, building the macro by way of the micro.
Digression follows digression as the reader is drawn down into Metcalf’s rabbit hole (or snake hole, if you will). Page-long sentences assault the senses with vivid descriptors and unorthodox syntax as the notion of the pastoral life is taken apart and reassembled as a sort of Frankenstein’s farm. And in the end, our narrator ultimately proves to be as detached from reality as his delusional father, albeit in a divergent direction.
There are stretches when the novel is weighed down by its own ambition, however – a few spots when it feels less inspired and more overwrought. Still, these brief low points are more than compensated for by the dizzying heights to which the book aspires; the occasional nadir only serves to point out the far more frequent instances of structural brilliance.
Despite the novel’s plotlessness – or perhaps because of it – it shines through as a triumph of style, an aesthetic marvel. The demands that Metcalf makes are significant and uncompromising, but they merit the effort spent meeting them. “Against the Country” proves itself to be well worth the wait.
September 22, 2014
What the heck did I just read? It is interesting and strange but admittedly the style really can throw off the best of readers. I don't know if it is brilliant or rambling, but I know there is certainly an audience for it. While not my usual choice, Against the Country certainly left a strange tingle in my brain. Again, what did I just read? In some ways it felt like stumbling upon the journal of a very damaged person. Here is a little taste of the eccentric writing:
"A mosquito has just now managed to kill itself in my drink. Am I to conclude from this that the creature as overly attracted to sweetness and so doomed to die sooner or later in someone's aromatic pool of poison? Or am I to conclude that this bug thought itself more clever than the usual bug and so deserved to be shown that it was not? Was this action, in other words, a display of hillbilly derring-do, or was the mosquito being uppity?"
This is not going to be something everyone likes, and the style isn't your usual sort. You have to 'get' what the author is doing here. It is certainly humoring the reader in a darkened vein and taking tar and feathers to the good country life, that isn't as pure and good as it's assumed to be. Though writing about fictional ignorance, racists, and angry youth I have a feeling the author himself is clever. This is a wild parody of reality... or is it?
If you don't like meta-fiction, then you may not enjoy this.
"A mosquito has just now managed to kill itself in my drink. Am I to conclude from this that the creature as overly attracted to sweetness and so doomed to die sooner or later in someone's aromatic pool of poison? Or am I to conclude that this bug thought itself more clever than the usual bug and so deserved to be shown that it was not? Was this action, in other words, a display of hillbilly derring-do, or was the mosquito being uppity?"
This is not going to be something everyone likes, and the style isn't your usual sort. You have to 'get' what the author is doing here. It is certainly humoring the reader in a darkened vein and taking tar and feathers to the good country life, that isn't as pure and good as it's assumed to be. Though writing about fictional ignorance, racists, and angry youth I have a feeling the author himself is clever. This is a wild parody of reality... or is it?
If you don't like meta-fiction, then you may not enjoy this.
September 25, 2014
This is going on my "read" shelf, but really I only made it through 22% and had to finally give up. I really wanted to like this book; thought I would even. But try as I might, there just was nothing interesting to me about it. I could have pushed through and eventually finished reading the book;however, what is the point? I read because I enjoy reading, and this book was not doing it for me. I hate putting a book down unfinished, yet sometimes ya gotta just do what ya gotta do. On to better books for me.
Thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for providing me an advanced copy for review. I'm sorry I couldn't oblige on a more positive note.
Thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for providing me an advanced copy for review. I'm sorry I couldn't oblige on a more positive note.
January 28, 2015
I forced myself to finish reading this book but now regret that time I will never have back. I kept thinking some thing funny or interesting was going to happen. Well not this page or this chapter or finally not at all. I am glad to see others have had this same reaction. I had begun to think this was some wonderful new approach to the writing of the novel I just was too unsophisticated to understand.
January 20, 2016
This is the best book I've read in years....Hilarious! It is Thomas Pynchon crossed with William Faulkner. How does he write so exquisitely, twisted, screamingly funny prose???? I have to read the same paragraphs over and over because I cannot believe what I just read. I have ordered this book in hard backed cover because I want the author to know that his work is so worth every penny I spend on this book. Insanely funny....
August 18, 2015
I read the words on the pages, but they didn't mean anything to me. It is a rant against the country country, Hicktown America as opposed to the country as a whole, which is what I thought it would be, but I'm not sure that would have made a difference. I did start out interested, but when he got into the thing with the school bus, my interest left and didn't return. Oh well. It's off my list.
dnf
May 3, 2015I only made it through two chapters. Normally I try to read at least 50 pages before DNF'ing, but I just couldn't handle the writing style anymore. It felt like I was reading an incredibly dense, pretentious, and rambling mess, with more commas and longer sentences than the ridiculous legal briefs I read all the time at work. No thanks.
September 2, 2020
This guy is SO mad that his parents moved the family to a farm. I tried to give this book 20% completion to see if I could come to enjoy it, but the chapter beginning "I abhor blackberries" was it for me.
March 24, 2025
Among the best comic novels I've read along with Alphabetical Africa - has a similar preoccupation with the murkiness of such concepts as sincerity and honesty and the elusiveness of truth. Detractors said that we only see the characters from the biased and at times hateful view of the narrator but that inspires a critical perspective on the text we're reading on a metafictional level. Reminds you of the legitimate social problems in rural America and the realistic problems arising from country living that are at times obscured by correction against malicious stereotypes. Yes, misanthropic, but not inaccurate about the many levels on which people delude themselves and the pain of living and sinning.
December 25, 2016
A lot of wonderful things have already been said here (by detractors, apologists, counter-apologists...) about various elements of this book's content, style, intelligent maddeningness.
I won't try to add a lot here, but I'm going on the record as a proud anti-counter-apologist. Skip to my last two paragraphs for the main point, if you like.
1.a) Siding with those who have pointed out so very rightly that if you stick with the energy and form of the language (and it's dense but really not that difficult), it's more than worth the investment of concentration. Metcalf spins you around and back back again--and you feel like a pinata, but when he hits you, it's with a brilliant analytical insight and violent hilarity. This work has dozens of the best Christmas presents I've ever received.
1.b) Yes, the prose is rambling at most times--but it's never unfocused. I swear that Metcalf edited multiple times and trimmed and filled and shaped it until it was exactly what he had in mind. I'm not saying that you have to like the work, but at least let him take you on the tour he's so meticulously planned.
2.) Let's talk for a moment about those insights, though. I won't accept that this is just an anti-rural screed. That's the semi-autobiographical reference point, yes, but look at everything the author says about [T]own that questions whether the urbanity of urbanity is true; look at how he connects the dirt of Goochland to that of Manhattan; note that he paints Lucifer as "kicking at" all of America; cringe as he reminds us that America's roadways have ensured that the poisonous, dead-Jeffersonian-dream "culture" of the gooch would circulate to the rest of our [stupid?] nation. I don't believe that Metcalf is attacking only the state of contemporary literature, either. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of Thomas Jefferson. We're all Goochlanders, cretins.
This book isn't just against the country--it's against the country. And it's awesome. Lighten up, buckle down and enjoy the fantastic hell out of this glorious little masterpiece.
I won't try to add a lot here, but I'm going on the record as a proud anti-counter-apologist. Skip to my last two paragraphs for the main point, if you like.
1.a) Siding with those who have pointed out so very rightly that if you stick with the energy and form of the language (and it's dense but really not that difficult), it's more than worth the investment of concentration. Metcalf spins you around and back back again--and you feel like a pinata, but when he hits you, it's with a brilliant analytical insight and violent hilarity. This work has dozens of the best Christmas presents I've ever received.
1.b) Yes, the prose is rambling at most times--but it's never unfocused. I swear that Metcalf edited multiple times and trimmed and filled and shaped it until it was exactly what he had in mind. I'm not saying that you have to like the work, but at least let him take you on the tour he's so meticulously planned.
2.) Let's talk for a moment about those insights, though. I won't accept that this is just an anti-rural screed. That's the semi-autobiographical reference point, yes, but look at everything the author says about [T]own that questions whether the urbanity of urbanity is true; look at how he connects the dirt of Goochland to that of Manhattan; note that he paints Lucifer as "kicking at" all of America; cringe as he reminds us that America's roadways have ensured that the poisonous, dead-Jeffersonian-dream "culture" of the gooch would circulate to the rest of our [stupid?] nation. I don't believe that Metcalf is attacking only the state of contemporary literature, either. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of Thomas Jefferson. We're all Goochlanders, cretins.
This book isn't just against the country--it's against the country. And it's awesome. Lighten up, buckle down and enjoy the fantastic hell out of this glorious little masterpiece.
January 7, 2015
I started this book twice.
I gave up on this book twice.
The third time will not be the charm because there will not be a third time.
Ben Metcalf’s “Against the Country” is just not for me.
It’s rambling, wordy, often overblown descriptions of every detail of the narrator’s life and the world around him is not well-balanced with the total lack of dialogue – at least through the first third of the story, at which point I gave up for good. The story, as it were, is heavy on violence (child on child, parent on child, parent on parent, etc.), drug and alcohol abuse (you just don’t fit in the story if you’re not down with it), sexuality (this is actually the least mentioned thing, which surprised me – although the narrator is still a child where I quit), and racism (seriously everyone is a racist).
All of this may well be true about the part of country and the time the author is writing about. The bits just don’t come together well enough for to get into the story.
“Against the Country” is available for purchase now.
(I received a copy of “Against the Country” through NetGalley in exchange for an honest & original review. This review will be cross-posted at NetGalley, Goodreads, and on my blog.)
I gave up on this book twice.
The third time will not be the charm because there will not be a third time.
Ben Metcalf’s “Against the Country” is just not for me.
It’s rambling, wordy, often overblown descriptions of every detail of the narrator’s life and the world around him is not well-balanced with the total lack of dialogue – at least through the first third of the story, at which point I gave up for good. The story, as it were, is heavy on violence (child on child, parent on child, parent on parent, etc.), drug and alcohol abuse (you just don’t fit in the story if you’re not down with it), sexuality (this is actually the least mentioned thing, which surprised me – although the narrator is still a child where I quit), and racism (seriously everyone is a racist).
All of this may well be true about the part of country and the time the author is writing about. The bits just don’t come together well enough for to get into the story.
“Against the Country” is available for purchase now.
(I received a copy of “Against the Country” through NetGalley in exchange for an honest & original review. This review will be cross-posted at NetGalley, Goodreads, and on my blog.)
March 2, 2015
Some of us are “indoor people”
Against the Country: A Novel by Ben Metcalf (Random House, $26).
The unnamed narrator of former Harper’s literary editor Ben Metcalf’s first novel, Against the Country, is forced by the realities of childhood dependency to participate in his father’s experiment with “back-to-the-land” living in the rural Virginia of the late ’70s and early ’80s.
Those of us who are decidedly “indoor people” will enjoy the literate and well-read rant against both the out-of-doors and those who would romanticize it; it is brilliant and beautiful writing, a literary polemic. But the actual narrative—an account of conflict between a self-centered and abusive father and his defiantly cultured son—receives short shrift.
Touted as a mashup of the Southern Gothic and metafiction styles, Against the Country is more metafiction and less Cold Comfort Farm, which leaves the narrative suffering under the weight of some otherwise really good writing.
Reviewed on Lit/Rant: www.litrant.tumblr.com
Against the Country: A Novel by Ben Metcalf (Random House, $26).
The unnamed narrator of former Harper’s literary editor Ben Metcalf’s first novel, Against the Country, is forced by the realities of childhood dependency to participate in his father’s experiment with “back-to-the-land” living in the rural Virginia of the late ’70s and early ’80s.
Those of us who are decidedly “indoor people” will enjoy the literate and well-read rant against both the out-of-doors and those who would romanticize it; it is brilliant and beautiful writing, a literary polemic. But the actual narrative—an account of conflict between a self-centered and abusive father and his defiantly cultured son—receives short shrift.
Touted as a mashup of the Southern Gothic and metafiction styles, Against the Country is more metafiction and less Cold Comfort Farm, which leaves the narrative suffering under the weight of some otherwise really good writing.
Reviewed on Lit/Rant: www.litrant.tumblr.com
November 1, 2015
This blurb is one of the reasons I registered in the drawing for this novel: "Exceptional in its verbal brilliance and conscientiousness, AGAINST THE COUNTRY involves us in a family's anguished and hilarious struggle against the strange dooms that seem peculiar to white rural America. This is a savage and gladdening novel." Wow, huh? Sounds fabulous. "Verbal brilliance" and "hilarious struggle"? I should have loved this!
My first clue that I wouldn't was coming across the word "metafiction" in the inside cover synopsis. Perhaps I'm a plebeian, but I don't even know what "metafiction" means. However, if it means writing whole paragraphs in verbose, meandering rhetorical questions that drip with condescension while maintaining a griping, complaining, I'm-so-much-better-than-my-background voice, then count me out.
I called it quits at page 47 because I have no desire to endure another 300 pages of someone with a superiority complex bitching about his childhood.
Thanks for nothing, LibraryThing.
My first clue that I wouldn't was coming across the word "metafiction" in the inside cover synopsis. Perhaps I'm a plebeian, but I don't even know what "metafiction" means. However, if it means writing whole paragraphs in verbose, meandering rhetorical questions that drip with condescension while maintaining a griping, complaining, I'm-so-much-better-than-my-background voice, then count me out.
I called it quits at page 47 because I have no desire to endure another 300 pages of someone with a superiority complex bitching about his childhood.
Thanks for nothing, LibraryThing.
October 6, 2017
Calling this a novel seems, at best, misleading and, at worst, a lie. Fictional memoir might be a better term although screed would be the most accurate.
Unfolding over dozens of anecdotes, the book is united under one theme: Rural America is an overrated cesspool populated by the dumb, the religious, and the mean—sometimes, with all the qualities converging in one person.
Written with the grandiloquence born of excessive whiskey and hubris, the unnamed narrator (here, only the animals are deemed worthy of that save Metcalf's hated father) acts as our proxy to a world where danger lurks on the school bus and home yard in the form of snakes: the one-eyed type for the former and copperheads for the latter.
There's little to marvel at save Metcalf’s ability to punctuate sentences that stretch to hundreds of words. With no nuance to the setting nor affection for the humanity that walks across it, there's only one excuse for this shrill one-note vendetta—to assert Metcalf’s superior status as a silver-tongued urbanite.
Unfolding over dozens of anecdotes, the book is united under one theme: Rural America is an overrated cesspool populated by the dumb, the religious, and the mean—sometimes, with all the qualities converging in one person.
Written with the grandiloquence born of excessive whiskey and hubris, the unnamed narrator (here, only the animals are deemed worthy of that save Metcalf's hated father) acts as our proxy to a world where danger lurks on the school bus and home yard in the form of snakes: the one-eyed type for the former and copperheads for the latter.
There's little to marvel at save Metcalf’s ability to punctuate sentences that stretch to hundreds of words. With no nuance to the setting nor affection for the humanity that walks across it, there's only one excuse for this shrill one-note vendetta—to assert Metcalf’s superior status as a silver-tongued urbanite.
February 3, 2015
I don't know what it means that this sort of literate, rolling, blind-rage-in-search-of-a-plot is exactly up my alley, but here we are. A spiritual successor to Exley's A Fan's Notes, only about 1/50th as drunken and three times as smart. A welcome rejoinder of back-to-the-earth cant, a takedown of the misery-cum-confessional memoir while beating it for pain on every page, this is a challenging but stone brilliant novel A star reducted as its flirtations (and then consummations, and then drunk-texts) with meta fiction get a bit too unclear in its third and fourth acts, but a strong open and close and some insanely well put together sentences (in a sarcastic sonnet to his wretched, impoverished home: "I should have known, when we first crossed your bounds, that my father would opt for a performance of his anguish rather than a deliverance from it") make this the first great book of the year for this reviewer.
October 2, 2015
I think this book is better than 3-stars, but wow is it impossible to listen to as an audiobook. The reader's southern drawl is nice, and fitting, but the weird way that he pauses in the middle of clauses is very disruptive. (Doesn't help that Metcalf has parenthetical statements inside of parenthetical statements and footnotes on footnotes.) I feel like the rhythms are all off and that a different reader would've done a much better job highlighting the humor.
That said, it is a fun takedown of country life and the idea that nature (or, Nature) is somehow superior to city life and good for the soul and all that enlightenment sort of stuff. It reminds me a lot of Epitaph for a Small Winner by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis in terms of the loopiness of the narration, the self-conscious remembrances, and the overwhelming sense of play.
I do recommend this, but do yourself a favor and buy the actual book.
That said, it is a fun takedown of country life and the idea that nature (or, Nature) is somehow superior to city life and good for the soul and all that enlightenment sort of stuff. It reminds me a lot of Epitaph for a Small Winner by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis in terms of the loopiness of the narration, the self-conscious remembrances, and the overwhelming sense of play.
I do recommend this, but do yourself a favor and buy the actual book.
January 21, 2018
A book never too late to abandon. This one-trick pony of two-clause sentences (or parts of them) and multiple imbedded brackets would be a horrific text to translate, because while difficult, it is not a challenge, since challenge entails a possibility of accomplishment, and there is not much accomplishing here. The author constructs a chain of dualities that undermines coherence, hold-together-ness and, quite intentionally, interpretable substance, as if implying: of all there are two, so why bother looking for a unifying one. There is no utterance to which there cannot be another one to add - the reality of the book is inherently parenthetical. It is a serviceable run-through for all practitioners of English, yet somehow not pleasure inducing nor mind opening. As you plow on through this bloated gothic novel, you realize there is no reward, only complicity in emptiness, futility of endeavor; it is, as is regularly reiterated, all the same.
September 8, 2015
I just couldn't with this book. Against the Country is the painful ramblings of a man who hates, loathes and despises everything about Goochland County, Virginia and his father. It's the exact opposite of Thoreau's Walden Pond as Metcalf finds any excuse to rail against anything that encounters him in his rural existence.
If a reader isn't turned off by the pure negativity of the book, Metcalf's writing style will. The book is a soliloquy aching for empathy but is nothing more than a tangle of half-baked thoughts. Metcalf eschews traditional dialogue and character development for a stream of consciousness approach. With all of his diversions and thoughts within a thought, his writing style makes as much sense as using a smashed saltine cracker as a jigsaw puzzle.
Save yourself the time and skip this book.
If a reader isn't turned off by the pure negativity of the book, Metcalf's writing style will. The book is a soliloquy aching for empathy but is nothing more than a tangle of half-baked thoughts. Metcalf eschews traditional dialogue and character development for a stream of consciousness approach. With all of his diversions and thoughts within a thought, his writing style makes as much sense as using a smashed saltine cracker as a jigsaw puzzle.
Save yourself the time and skip this book.
March 10, 2021
i wasnt quite in the mood for this ornate, scabrous pile of language about an unhappy existence - sort of thomas bernhard in exurban/rural VA, constantly admonishing both the petty indignities of life and also the larger hypocrisies of america. my moods notwithstanding, the voice of the narrator is remarkable: bile, arranged in towering heaps of dependent clauses, into shapes out of a gothic cathedral, to the point of majesty. it is an article of faith w me that all books are at least 33% too long; this one is pushing 300% too long, but i appreciate the bent energy even though i tapped out about a quarter of the way through after a skim to see if the pony found a second trick or a plot emerged (no, and no).
October 29, 2014
I tried. At first I thought all the ramblings and run-on sentences would lead somewhere brilliant. The more I read, however, the more it seems like it is just that - ramblings. It's not brilliance in disguise as I had hoped. Unless something that blows the reader's mind happens in the last 1/4 of the book. It reminds me a bit of a modern The Catcher in the Rye. I hated that book so that's not a good thing for me personally. I would love to read a review by someone who liked this so I can see what was so great about it that I should continue to force my way through it.
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