Overcast: The unauthorized biography of Sunshine Rodriguez

by mark Jabbour

Contemporary American Literature, Experimental, Psychological Romantic Drama. Explores The Law of Attraction, Personality, and Addiction. Life in early 21st Century America in the rural American West, via the lives of two characters, Joe Burns, an old man, and Sunshine Rodriguez, a young girl.

294 pages, Paperback

First published November 17, 2014

About the author

I was weened on Greek Mythology, graduated to Edgar Rice Burroughs & then moved to James A. Michener and then on to the Influences listed. I began writing non-fiction in 1992 - Letters to the Editor, grants, Op-EDs and such and started writing fiction by accident, in 2004. I just released my book concerning the US Election 2016. It's pretty much a theory of everything. http://www.markjabbour.com

Reviews

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

into this house we're born,
into this world we're thrown.
like a dog without a bone,
an actor out alone...

- The Doors

Most novels try to draw you seamlessly into a dream, so that the characters feel ‘real’; Overcast on the other hand begins commenting on itself in the second chapter, even inviting the reader, ‘for fun’, to keep a scorecard of the different mechanisms of repression the characters employ/fall prey to. We might call this postmodern, but I have a feeling that Mark Jabbour, the author, doesn’t necessarily care if you call it that or not; he’s an intuitive writer, and therefore not intentionally trying to work in one particular genre. The second chapter also introduces what the narrator calls the Law of Attraction, which is one of the book’s central themes and seems to resemble karma, and establishes that the book will be in part an exploration of personality, the formation of which, the narrator suggests, unfortunately happens before you’re old enough to make any kind of sound decision about trying to direct it.

This is a book that’s rich enough to offer multiple interpretations; but broadly speaking, I would say it seems to follow three tracks: the first follows the lives of two main characters in contemporary Colorado (or near-contemporary; the beginning of the book takes place during the 2008 primary season), the second is the exploration of personality (about which the narrator comments from somewhere outside of time), and the third is what we might call the Outside World- global events, the communal reality that most of us seem to share, view remotely, and have almost zero influence on: wars, elections, the fluctuations of the economy, shootings, etc. Joe Burns, one of the main characters, caucuses for Obama and, while delivering a speech punctuated with swigs from a flask, “…stops his hand in mid air and instead lightly scratches his face with his fingers, down, up, and back down. Like he’s seen Bill Clinton do, who he, Joe Burns, thinks lifted the gesture from Marlon Brando in The Godfather.” These tracks, the book seems to reminding us, are not mutually exclusive; in fact, our communal reality can seep into our very semi-conscious gestures, and perhaps affect us in ways more subtle and mysterious. And despite appearances, maybe we have some influence on it, as well.

Disclaimer: Mark is my friend. Since this is an independently published book, it’s possible that you will approach it with certain preconceptions. And after chapters 2 and 3, which I found interesting, a part of me still thought, “uh oh. Is this entire book just going to be Mark’s unstructured philosophy?” It’s true that there is a loose, digressive quality to this novel, and it’s true that certain parts probably could have profited from editing: there are some spelling mistakes and misplaced apostrophes, as well as certain sequences, like a long play that one of the characters writes to another character and sends by e-mail, that could, I felt, have been shorter, or expressed through dialogue.

But I also think the book’s deliberate digressiveness is a strength. There is a rawness to the book, which is apparent in the prose (which is full of ideas, sometimes elegiac but more often blunt and funny- “If you don’t really like it, now, then why the fuck have you been camping all these years?”- and reads more like someone trying to have a real conversation than, as in most contemporary fiction, like someone trying hard to impress you and sound poetic) and also in a few distinctive scenes (a desultory conversation in a car that’s interrupted by a deer running across the road and ends with Joe Burns drawing a knife across the animal’s throat, or an oddly memorable description of a character who takes a shit -“wiping my ass was out of the question. It was not so far to fall to the floor…”), particularly in the last 100 or so pages, which are my favorite. Joe Burns watches coverage of the shooting in Tucson and thinks about guns, he reads, he dreams that he’s trapped in The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell, he (and the reader) wonders if he is really the dangerous sort of person who will shoot this guy the girl he likes is now living with, etc.

This is an intelligent and idiosyncratic novel that asks in a modern context the eternal questions found in all great literature. It is a book that to some extent ‘keeps you guessing’, as they say, but more importantly keeps you thinking, after you’ve finished it.