That's Not a Feeling

by Dan Josefson, Charles Carroll (Narrator)

Benjamin arrives with his parents for a tour of Roaring Orchards, a therapeutic boarding school tucked away in upstate New York. Suddenly, his parents are gone and Benjamin learns that he is there to stay. Sixteen-years-old and with two failed suicides to his name, Benjamin must navigate his way through a new world of "popped privileges," "candor meetings," "morning meds," and "cartoon brunches"--all run by adults who have yet to really come of age themselves. The only person who comprehends the school's many rules and rituals is Aubrey, the founder and headmaster. Fragile, brilliant, and prone to rage, he is as likely to use his authority to reward students as to punish them. But when Aubrey falls ill, life at the school begins to unravel. Benjamin has no one to rely on but the other students, especially Tidbit, an intriguing but untrustworthy girl with a "self-afflicting personality." More and more, Benjamin thinks about running away from Roaring Orchards--but he feels an equal need to know just what it is he would be leaving behind.

Genres: Fiction, Graphic Novels, Realistic Fiction, Young Adult, Adult, Contemporary, Novels

Audio CD

First published October 2, 2012

About the author

Dan Josefson has received a Fulbright research grant and a Schaeffer Award from the International Institute of Modern Letters. He has an MFA from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and lives in Brooklyn.

That’s Not a Feeling is his first novel.

Reviews

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

About midway through my three days at BEA I happened to be walking past one of the big publisher booths and I caught a snippet of a conversation. A middle aged man wearing a badge designating him as working for a publisher was talking to another middle aged man (I didn't catch a glimpse of his badge, nor the name of the publisher the first man worked for, I just caught the color of the badge) and was saying, in the pompous voice of grad students and college professors, there are just no good books being published this year. Maybe he was talking about his own particular company, or maybe there was a preamble to that statement that would have put it into context, but the thought that ran immediately through my head was bullshit!

This has been a fairly good year for books so far, just to name a few stand-outs that came out right at the beginning of the year were Blueprints of the Afterlife, Flame Alphabet,Threats, and Hot Pink, along with the non-self published version of Naked Singularity, and not to mention some very good books that have just been translated into English for the first time by Open Letter and Dalkey. Then there is also Dare Me, which might not be spectacular but is very very good, and coming this fall there some of the big names releasing books, and (this isn't meant to be an exhaustive list, just things that I've happened to read so far and really liked, there are some more to-be-released ARC's in my BEA pile that I'm pretty excited about still left to read) some first time authors releasing things like Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, and this book That's Not a Feeling.

Maybe publishers can't figure out how to do their job and sell books to people*, but the writers are doing their job and getting some excellent books written.

Between the comic book cover and the blurb from David Foster Wallace I knew I'd have to read this book, and it was one of the surprise snags I made while wandering around grabbing up free stuff. The book didn't disappoint, it's definitely worthy of DFW accolades and a very catchy cover. I hope that the readers out there will also be motivated into giving this a try when it is published in October.

The book takes place at a school for troubled teens in Upstate New York (I personally placed the book at Yadoo and filled in all of the descriptions to fit there, the proximity of some stables added to my Saratoga placement of the book, but there is really nothing to put the setting of the novel as a real place in Upstate New York). The school's run by an eccentric headmaster who has come up with a bizarre philosophy / psychology that governs the way everything is done at the school.

The story is told by one of the students at the school, a sixteen year old who has twice attempted suicide and whose parents trick him into attending the school. His first appearance in the book is seen from the perspective of some of the more troubled girls on the campus who watch as he frees himself from his parents' car by kicking out the front windshield. As a couple of other reviews here mention, the narrator is a troubling aspect in the novel, it's told by this one student, but he is omniscient in his knowledge of what is going on in people's heads sometimes but more often of activities that there are no way that he would ever be able to tell stories about. There are a few attempts given to how the narrator could know certain things, but the reader just has to kind of take it for granted that either he knows these things because someone told him, that it's just a literary device and give him some leeway or that maybe a good deal of what is being told in the story is bullshit and the narrator isn't reliable at all. I personally chose the middle choice, and stopped worrying about it after about thirty pages.

Quirky, depressed, acting out kids in an institutional setting with a DFW blurb on the cover is kind of begging comparisons to Infinite Jest. And this is definitely in the same family as IJ or The Instructions, but it's probably has more in common with the feeling of Skippy Dies.

The one problem with a book evoking these titles (well two problems, one is that these are all amazing novels and it's hard to live up to any of them) is that they are all gigantic books, and if you are like me part of what makes them so good is that they are nearly encyclopedic in the world they create. Coming in at about 340 pages That's Not a Feeling isn't going to satisfy that massive feeling these other books have but for the pages it has it is very good. I couldn't help thinking as the book was nearing the end that I wish there were a few hundred more pages of this story to tell, and I think that there was definitely room for this to have grown into a sprawling monster (and here is really my own major criticism of the book, the ending feels rushed).

The book is hilarious while at the same time being dark and depressing. There is a chapter that had me visibly cringing while riding the subway, at the emotional and physical pains a character was going through (I like to think I'm a fairly stoic reader in public). There is some definite signs of greatness in these pages and I'm looking forward to seeing what Dan Josefson comes out with next.

So, I know in one of my last reviews I told you to add a book to your to-read shelves and I usually hate recommending books to people, but this is another one I think people should give a chance. October is still quite a bit away but I'm recommending you keep a mental note to get your grubby little hands on this when it comes out, especially my DFW loving goodreads friends. I think you're going to like this one.

*Seriously, did Dean Koontz's new book need to have it's cover draped over the front of the Javit Center? It's going to sell to the people it's going to sell to, why not push a mid-level author that you could nurture into a super-star selling level?

[Oriana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here's a review from Word Bookstore that made me want to read this book so bad:

Dan Josefson's debut novel is subtle, hilarious, heart-wrenching, cute, dark, and intelligent. That's Not a Feeling is like Ben Stiller and Co. in the film Heavyweights...if that film took place in a coed school for "troubled teens"...and had been directed by Wes Anderson...and was a novel, not a movie.

That was back in 2012 when the book came out, and of course I got real excited and then promptly forgot all about. Then a few weeks ago one of my smarty bookfriends gave this book a briskly glowing review here on GR, and then did the amazing thing of actually putting the actual book into my actual hands. And even though I had asked her to borrow it only a few days earlier, when she gave it to me I said, "What's this again?" And she said "Duh, you moron, just read it."

And so I did.

This is a pretty sneaky book because it's written with a fairly light touch. It's this sort of black-comic thing about fucked up teens in a strange alternative school that has its own particular vocabulary and bizarre systems. The whole place is ruled by a benevolent but sporadically screamy headmaster who is as wont to ramble passionately about ancient philosophy as to curse out a student for not paying attention. Teachers make up class names like "Books Spencer Can Reach From the Couch" and "Cooking With Butter," which is a philosophy class, of course. Kids are always doing "reciprocity detail," where they dig holes in the garden or muck out sewage pipes to "give back" to the school for keeping them there, or then they're getting their various things "popped," meaning they lose privileges to that thing, whether it's pants or furniture or even their name. But the kids are like indomitably well spirited, for the most part, either taking the process seriously or else making a convincing act like they do, until all of a sudden someone is beating his roommate bloody with a curtain rod, or faking seizures so convincingly that she actually passes out, or locking himself in a closet with an ax, or stealing a razor to cut herself alone in her room late at night.

So it's a pretty intense book that masquerades as something way less intense, I guess. The Wes Anderson comparison is apt, because on the surface it reads sort of blasé and calmly kooky, but then it has this really super dark undercurrent. It gets pretty fucking brutal, in fact, which I should have seen coming but completely didn't.

I did feel like there was a fair amount of unresolved stuff when it ended, and it's told in a strange style that's more or less first-person omniscient, which gets confusing and a little awkward when the narrator describes a scene in great detail that he then walks into. But despite that, it was so absorbing and strange, and I really liked it quite a lot.

[Hannah Garden · Rating 5 out of 5]

This. Was. So. Good. I don't even want to talk about it, it's so perfect. Don't read any of the reviews they all miss the point. Just get a copy, if you're a good reader who loves books and/or is aggravated that so much contemporary stuff is silly and deeply lacking, you will be so glad and rewarded. This was my 600th Goodreads book since joining in March 2008 and I am happy it was.

[david · Rating 3 out of 5]

“I’m writing all this down so I can forget about her (Tidbit, a girl confined at Roaring Orchards, too), so I can stop thinking about the school. All I want is to lay something down between myself and the things that happened there, even if it’s nothing but a screen of words. There’s an insect I read about called the Western Spittlebug. Clastoptera juniperina, whose nymphs protect themselves by chewing up juniper stems and spitting out little bubbles until they’ve covered themselves in foam. The foam keeps the bugs from being dried up and burned by the sun. That’s really all I’m doing by writing this.”

And so begins another random book.

Press ‘refresh’ and let's continue...

This is the writer’s first book. He switches between an omniscient observer and first-person character throughout. Tougher than it appears.

It is a story that defies categorization as you may exact from the above quote.

The outline goes something like this:

After two failed suicide attempts (you can only have one successful crack at it) Benjamin is sent to a home for troubled kids in upstate New York.

And then it gets a little ‘Clockwork Orangey.’

The school/institution is different than the ones we have read about earlier. These support both boys and girls at various stages of discontent or malaise. And it serves as an academic theatre also. There are fabricated names like “New Boys and Alternative Boys and New Girls and Alternative Girls” denoting a mental state or loss of development/progress a child makes, emotionally or scholastically.

In other words, an unconvincing program created for troubled children by an older and magnanimous man named Aubrey who owned and once lived in these structures before he turned it into a school/institution. Another man with an idea...

The kids here receive instruction in certain courses, and they also receive their meds daily. They live on campus. The staff administrators behave as puerile and naive as their patients/students. The ancillary staff is equally inept and uncertified.

This parable, allegory, is told simply and deftly. The cadence and manufactured simplicity of the writing reminds me of that Coloradan, Frederick Backman's style.

All told, this is the kind of book you will either like or not.

Why then three stars? It does seem to contradict your prior statement, david?

It’s complicated.

[Meri · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really expected to love this book and I just didn't. The narration shifts around from first person to third person omniscient, which doesn't really work. Some of the characters are mildly fleshed out, only to disappear into the background without having their stories resolved. I wasn't sure why some of the kids were there, and some situations were not adequately explained. The whole thing lacked authenticity. I kept looking for the author, and I didn't see him. I couldn't find any evidence of him having been in or researched homes for troubled teens.

I get the whole "boarding school as allegory" trope, but you still have to remember the story. You can't just throw in a bunch of off-the-wall elements and leave them there to add scenery. Well, I suppose you can if you're Kafka. But there's only one Kafka, and the quality of writing in this book did not bring him to mind.

Who were the regular kids? How did Laurel manage to stay enrolled past the age of eighteen? How did you "graduate"? As John Green would say, there's a certain compact between the author and the reader. This was not met.

**Even the New York Times review lacks earnestness. Is this one of those books that we are all supposed to pretend that we "get" or risk looking stupid? Food for thought...

[Lesa Parnham · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was surreal. In parts it was so hilarious and in others it was sad. The school is supposed to be therapeutic environment for disturbed children, but in most cases it is the adults that are disturbed. This book is brilliant in that it has so many scary boundaries that the adults enforce, including manipulating the children's parents, harsh punishments for the kids and brainwashing for the teachers and room parents. Kind of like Jim Jones and his kool-aid in a book. Very intellectual read and I enjoyed every moment of it.

BTW: I attended a boarding school from 9-12 that could be why this book appealed to me. However my school was NOTHING like this.

[Ashley · Rating 2 out of 5]

...this went straight over my head. I just didn't get it- I didn't find anything remarkable about it.

I saw it hyped on Tumblr, then saw the DFW blurb, and really liked the title/cover, so I figured it'd be great...but I really disliked it. Kind of a bummer.

took me FOREVER to read, just because I absolutely dreaded approaching it after the first half (for some reason, I remained pretty optimistic for the first half, but it never picked up)

[Corey · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

This smart, clever, fun, and funny debut novel is one of the best books I've read all year. THAT'S NOT A FEELING is set at Roaring Orchards School for Troubled Teens, a boarding school in upstate New York run by an eccentric but charismatic headmaster, Aubrey.

Our protagonist, Benjamin, is sent to Roaring Orchards after an apparent suicide attempt, and thus serves as a sort of outsider/stand-in for the reader. As the novel moves on, we are introduced to the philosophy behind the school: that the troubled students at Roaring Orchard suffer chiefly from "intimacy" issues, which can be overcome only via total honesty and transparency, as well as "proper" expression (e.g., R.O. has a list of 7 feelings, and students who articulate other affects are told, as the title suggests, that they are not expressing their emotions properly).

I read the novel as a critique of existentialist philosophy a la Camus. Josefson seems to be saying here that, yes, the meanings and structures upon which the "adult" world (a world the students by and large are reluctant to join) are founded are flimsy and unreal, but in the end, Radical Freedom too proves evasive and unsatisfying. The students at R.O. are constantly fabricating histories for themselves, exploring new identities, changing place, names, etc.--and yet they are still unhappy. The girls cut themselves and the boys brutally assault each other simply to have something to do. There is drug use and breakouts and no end of emotional outbursts. Perhaps--with the reference to Camus in mind--it is not a coincidence that Benjamin arrives at the school a suicide case.

It's not a perfect novel by any means. Josefson is undisciplined in his use of the omniscient/first person point of view, and the book occasionally meanders aimlessly as he jumps from the mind of character to character. There's also not much of a plot, although the author is skilled enough so that the book never feels like a slog.

Furthermore, TNAF is incredibly well-written, and nearly all of the characters--even those who appear for just a few pages--feel as though they exist here in the real world. Josefson has written a funny and thought-provoking novel here, and I'm eager to see where he goes next. The evidence here suggests he may well be the heir apparent to David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo.

[Marija · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hmm...I think that if I gave this book to the reluctant readers I used to work with, after five minutes they would have thrown it across the room in frustration. This story really plays with unreliable narration. It forces the reader to wonder how is it possible for Benjamin to know all of this. What’s truth and what’s fiction? Even though this is a retrospective story, Benjamin’s narration constantly shifts perspective, describing events from other points of view—events he couldn’t possibly have witnessed—with the older Benjamin peaking in at various points, incorporating little notes and comments.

If I approached this book when I was younger, I don’t think I would have liked it, instead preferring my safe, relatively uncomplicated 19th century stories. Josefson’s novel has a post-modern feel, and reminded me of The French Lieutenant’s Woman...how John Fowles as narrator would pop in various intervals saying hello. This is typically not the kind of literary genre I enjoy reading. I generally like texts that read straight through, stories that really allow the reader to focus in on various subtle connections within the text—how complex themes and language connect with and enhance character development. Don’t misunderstand me. That’s Not a Feeling is an novel that certainly does this as well, however, it forces the reader to work in order to find all of the little nuances that are hidden in and among the words. Thus, I think this is one of those works that fairs better when read again.

That said, somehow Josefson’s book appealed to my sense of humor. I do like misfit characters, and this book is chock full of them—from the adults to the children. Everything described is a topsy-turvy mess, a mess that doesn’t seem to want to be resolved or even get better. In that sense, this is a very bleak, almost creepy read. Yet given the fact that this is a retrospective text, there is an underlying sense of survival. Overall, I feel that Josefson penned an interesting book.

[Alexandra Leith · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved "That's Not A Feeling" I usually do not read books like this. My boss, at the bookstore I work at got it before it was released, and she asked me to read it. If I liked it should would get copies to sell at the store. I completley recomend the book. For someone like me who reads mostly paranormal books, and romance books this was a very different change of pace. It was a little hard at frist to understand who's story was being told at what time, but the further I got into the novel the easier it became for me to know who's story was being told. I also loved the ending. I know some people have said that they want to know what happend to everyone, but at places like that people usually never hear from eachother again. That is just the reality of places like that, so I am glad that Dan didn't make long drawn out goodbyes, or tell of happily ever afters because in all honesty how many of them would have had a "normal life?"

[Carly · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this book up kind of at random, off of either the employee's favorites or local authors shelf at the bookstore when I was rage purchasing books. I had no expectations going in, I wasn't even all that sure what it was about. And I loved it. It's a character driven book about teens at a boarding school for troubled youth in upstate New York. The book is told from a students point of view, and it's immediately clear that the adults here have just as many problems, if not more, than the kids. If you're looking for plot, this isn't the book for you. But I found the people so engaging, that reading it constantly won out over playing games on my iPhone while on the Subway, which is the highest praise a book can get from me these days.

[Dara · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really weird book.

[Noah Sanders · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sometimes a pull quote will trick you. Sometimes you'll be elbows deep in the tail-end of Infinite Jest baffled that any writer can pull of an, er, feat(?) of literature that dense and amazing and you'll start to think that anything you see with that author's pull-quote slathered across the page is going to be as stunning and original as that author's most-famed work. Realize now though good readers that pull quotes are, for the most part, nasty tricks and that if you're going to get yourself involved in a book based a recommendation from the top left corner of another book, you're pretty much signing up to see Sex & The City 2 because Leonard Maltin said it was the "...Movie of the year!"

Dan Josefson's debut novel That's Not a Feeling was somehow endorsed by David Foster Wallace and an a particularly deep binge of that book, I decided that it was probably important to read anything and everything that DFW ever professed to enjoy. A pull quote from DFW is rare (and if you can believe that interview at the end of this edition, this is his first) and in my mind it seemed that DFW was a discerning reader and a moralistic writer that wouldn't just sign up for a pull-quote because it seemed the thing to do. Thus, gravitas was ascribed to DFW's recommendation and two hundred and thirty pages in to That's Not A Feeling I realized that I'd been bamboozled.

That's Not a Feeling is barely a story. It has the generic foundations that make up a traditional story - plot, characters, setting, even a hint of narrative progression - yet all of them are so sparsely attended to that when the book ends you feel like you've been huffing air for three hundred pages. You might feel a bit light-headed, but nothing will really come of it. The story takes place at Roaring Orchard, a New Age school for troubled youth somewhere where it snows, and loosely follows a character named Benjamin as he meets people and does things and then does other things. The other characters, a sort of buffet of stock "crazy" characters putter about in the confines of the setting and sometimes interact, but for the most part just think in big expansive thought bubbles about being crazy. I would further explain the plot, but the book seems to be the middle of a bigger plot, some sort of slice-of-life approach that Josefson takes that leaves the reader with a handful of stock characters and a no sense of satisfaction when he quickly ties up what could be referred to as "plot threads".

That's Not a Feeling feels like a rough draft, like ten or fifteen scenes/ideas that were roughly hewn together in time for a novel deadline and then shipped of to an editor who was like, "There might be something here, but it needs a lot of fleshing out." This editor might have then gone on vacation and been eaten by a shark only to be replaced by a young gun assistant editor who wanted nothing more than to get a book published before his trust fund kicked in and just grabbed the first "finished manuscript" he could get his hands on.

In layman's terms: this is an incomplete story with incomplete characters that is able to foist itself off as a moody, omni-present peek at psychotherapy.

David Foster Wallace, I still love you, but I'm wary.

[christa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Benjamin has agreed to tour Roaring Orchards, not move in. So when it becomes obvious that his parents have duped him, he unleashes his fury all over the windshield of the family car. He kicks out the front window and is eventually restrained by the staff. The upstate home for troubled youth covers the gamut of troubles. Benjamin’s own: two suicide attempts. The wild-child resumes of his peers are more colorful and range from a spending spree with dad’s credit card to the therapist-friendliness of being “too self-afflicting.”

“That’s Not a Feeling” by Dan Josefson is a series of almost-there incidents at the mansion and too brief glimpses at the characters who live and work there. It’s written in a very wide brush, subtle way that becomes increasingly frustrating as the book goes on and nothing develops. It is just so close. It could spit and land on great, clever and funny. Instead its stuck in just-better-than-meh.

The school is run by Aubrey, who has the potential to be both one of the greatest characters of 2012 and also an example of beating a caricature to death. Aubrey’s philosophies lean toward a rule-lessness. He stresses intimacy development (students must stay within arms length of each other) and guardian blame. There are touches of solitary confinement. When a character is outed as being too needy, she is “ghosted” and no one is allowed to acknowledge her existence. He speaks in winding paragraphs and allegory like a guru. Most of the major action on-campus involves his staff, who do things like base curriculum on which books in the bookcase can be reached without leaving the chair. Aubrey’s appearances in the story are too brief for such a fantastic and funny character. Or maybe his brief appearances are what keep him from becoming repetitious.

There is a strange perspective here. One is an omniscient third-person who wanders through the minds of the staff and other students. The other is Benjamin’s first person glimpse. The story shifts between the two within a single page in a way that feels self-consciously experimental.

The story has a loose template: Years later, Benjamin is at the now-abandoned school and he’s thinking back on his time there and the people he met, including Tidbit, a trouble-saturated girl he gets close to. This allows Josefson to create incidents: Benjamin digs back to his own ignominious introduction to the school, students attempt to run away, the missing razor blade story, a love affair between two staff members and the catastrophic birth simulation event that was a particularly low point in the school’s history.

This story feels like it would play better as a linear narrative with a single perspective. Only a few of the mini stories really stand alone. As is, it’s just a little better than okay.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

www.readingloves.blogspot.com

Dan Josefson's debut novel is an odd piece of fiction set in a darkly wrought juvenile camp for troubled children in upstate New York. Benjamin has been abandoned at Roaring Orchards by his parents and narrates his immersion into the strange community that is made up of unreliable, neurotic adults serving as counselors, and their delinquent young charges. These adults are hinted to have just as serious personal problems plaguing them as the kids at the camp, and multiple even dislike the techniques and structure that make Roaring Orchards so different.

The novel is populated by such a large cast of adults and teens that you don't really get a strong sense of any personalities, even our oddly omnipotent narrator Benjamin, who inexplicably describes scenes he didn't witness. Indeed, the character most likely to encourage connection with a reader is Tidbit, who is the closest thing Benjamin has to a friend, and also a compulsive liar. Tidbit's experience with the camp sets the scene, but again oddly enough, as narrated by Benjamin. It's an uncomfortable structure that muddied the waters for me. I kept waiting for Benjamin to have meaningful moments with counselors like Aaron and Doris, who he offers incredibly intimate insights on, but my waiting never offered up any fruit in that case

There really isn't a slow build up to any particular climax, but more the meandering nonsense of day to day antics and outbursts of the kids, paired with the ineffectual and oftentimes laughable pseudo-psychology of the camps' staff, as headed by the elusive and charismatic Aubrey.

The kids are routinely ostracized and manipulated, and sinister enough in their desperation to manipulate right back. That is where Josefson truly shines; you absolutely believe them capable of the haphazard chaos they create within and around themselves. There's a shamelessness in the drama that is life within this dry, sometimes bleak place that Josefson evokes consistently throughout this novel.

Aside from those bursts of action supplied by trouble making kids, the novel doesn't build directly upwards into a climax. It can be a bit dry at times, and chillingly unpredictable. The drawback is that it didn't encourage me to read on from chapter to chapter; it really felt like work. The humor is quiet, and bittersweet. You'll laugh as you flinch at the awkwardness of the shunning and other absurd counseling techniques.

www.readingloves.blogspot.com

[Aaron · Rating 3 out of 5]

The entire time I was reading this book, I was planning on giving it 2 stars. I was in a hurry to finish it because honestly, it bored me almost the entire time. It hurts for me to say that because I really, really wanted to love this book. My reason, along with many others', for reading it was the DFW blurb on the cover: "a bold, funny, mordant, and deeply intelligent debut". By the end of the book, I was flying through it and picking up on some of the more important lines and observations, which until then had been eluding me. The ending was beautiful and very fitting for the story, which I rarely find, but the problem I have with this book is that the beginning and middle of it don't make the book worthwhile. I'm not in the position to tell an author how to write their book, but I think this would've been much more powerful as a novella of about 130 or so pages. A lot happened in it without delivering much to me. Quick little moments of beauty or cleverness would pop up here and there but for most of the book I was wishing it would just end.

But, like I said, the ending was gorgeous and I think that's what's making me leave this book with 3 stars instead of 2. Not something I would recommend to friends, but I can't say that I didn't enjoy reading the most brilliant parts.

[P. · Rating 4 out of 5]

So, this was pretty great. I'm not sure I've read a boarding school book quite like it. Benjamin is speaking in the first person, but he is also recounting events from the perspective of other former students/teachers as if he were them, and it works well. It also means that the story isn't really Benjamin's story of coming of age. It is, in a background way, but it's more the story of the philosophy of the school, told through small scenes, and it is also just as much Tidbit's story. Not a lot happens (until the end) but I found it hard to put down. As the school lulls Benjamin, so does the book lull the reader, and it became just as hard for me to articulate why the school was so messed up as it does for the students and dorm parents. Make no mistake, though, it is messed up. I bought a copy accidentally - it was on my to-read list but I mistook it for a comic-- and I'm glad that I did.

[Alicia · Rating 2 out of 5]

I couldn't quite grasp what the story was about and lost interest around page 150. I get that Aubrey is an odd character with the gift to make the illogical, logical by taking in kids with problems from suicide, willfulness, mental disorders, that their parents can't help and making them into something by showing them the error of their ways. Yet, Aubrey is really the only one who understands what goes on at Roaring Orchards. Students want to escape or are punished, yet they are also given privileges that confuse and annoy. Benjamin, the narrator and new member at Roaring Orchards is a trustworthy narrator as he hasn't succumbed to the every day monotony of life at the Orchards and is still hoping to leave the institution.

The conclusion isn't really fulfilling and it definitely wasn't worth almost 400 pages worth of investment.

[Mandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

***Spoiler Alert***

When I saw the blurb from DFW on this book I was expecting it to be spectacular. It was good - probably really good - but my expectations were much higher. Josefson used so many of the elements I loved in a book. He has this way of walking that really fine line between horribly sad and hilariously funny. There are parts of this story that make no sense at the outset, and you wait the entire time for them to be resolved, but they never are. At that point, the only thing left to do is laugh at it all. Think of an entire school of mentally ill kids running around wearing nothing but bed sheets because they are ordered to by the staff, or a student suffocating while he is being "reborn" through a tunnel of cushions as part of his therapy. It doesn't get anymore horribly funny than that.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is something I would recommend to a very specific reader. It's terrifying and sad and utterly bizarre, and it will make your feel like you've lost a little bit of your sanity when you're reading it. The writing has some really great literary moments, especially for a debut novel-- it doesn't feel like it's trying too hard.

From a publishing-seller side of things this book could be seen as a tough sell. It's unnerving and unusual. But, with the type of reader who likes books of this veinl; it's got a comic panel cover and a blurb by David Foster Wallace, so they're doing all they can to catch the buyer's attention.

Anyway, it comes out in October. I'll be interested to see how it goes over.

[Mike Young · Rating 5 out of 5]

from NOÖ [14]:

Read this in an apartment that has carpet in the kitchen. It’s a novel about a psychotherapy boarding school/cult. Its first person narration is mystically sneaky. You can touch all the characters’ knees under the table. The headmaster has a heartbreaking dream about his first wife. The plot gets dark and smart. Read this if once on the a bus you saw a glum young man in a camouflage jacket and orange cargo pants carefully holding what looked, to you, like a tinfoil-covered pie. Except a little head popped out of the tinfoil. And it looked exactly like the glum young man, except the head was wearing glasses and trying not to cry, whereas the young man had obviously given up.

[Roberta · Rating 2 out of 5]

That's Not a Feeling è un libro che mi ha deluso parecchio, anche se credo che la maggior parte di quello che mi è piaciuto sia dovuta più ad aspettative sbagliate mie che ad una mancanza del romanzo. Dan Josefson scrive bene e la sua prosa pulita e piacevole ha reso semplice continuare la lettura fino alla fine anche se non ero soddisfatta (inoltre da altre recensioni mi era sembrato di capire che da un certo punto in poi migliora, il che forse è anche vero, ma non come mi aspettavo).

http://robertabookshelf.blogspot.it/2...

[Gracie Bates-Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having experience working at a residential treatment facility I believe the author uncannily articulates the culture. Although, some aspects of the culture are exaggerated and uncomfortable while reading. The book is well written and presents like a first hand encounter. The characters are life like and are not a distant thought in a fantastical world. I thought the book was an excellent read about teenagers and the integration of psychological processes plus teenage angst. I give this book four stars and believe it is a great read that is distinctive in a day and age of popular propaganda.

[Leslie T · Rating 3 out of 5]

Irritating at first, but once I got a little more into their world I liked it more and more... Characters could have been fleshed out more (these "kids" seem innocent, but totally aren't! It takes a while to get a sense of that). But then the end! The end! Would recommend it just for that.

[Aurora · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding. Read this now - this guy's going to be big. Also, I really want a shirt that says PROPERTY OF ROARING ORCHARDS SCHOOL FOR TROUBLED TEENS.

[Kenneth · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best new book I've read in years. Give it a chance.

[Mark Matthews · Rating 4 out of 5]

That’s Not A Feeling, by Dan Josefson, is the story of Roaring Orchards, a boarding school for troubled youth, and traces the experiences of Benjamin, a new student who encounters this strange world following two failed suicide attempts. After smashing out his parents windshield in the facilities parking lot, and believing he was ‘just on a tour,’ Benajamin’s parents leave him without a goodbye in the hands of staff who adhere to the school’s philosophy that few can explain or understand. The journey of Benjamin, along with other students, including one particularly endearing and quirky girl named tidbit, is told in mixed narrative. Benjamin is admitted as Aubrey, the school ‘headmaster’ and creator of this world, is sick and may be dying.

The title, That’s Not A Feeling, comes from the list of accepted feelings a student, and a staff member, is allowed to identify when being challenged and confronted, and it just one of the many ways forced and feigned ways of being are put upon the cast of memorable and distinct characters.

I received an Advanced Review copy of the novel for my role as a Great Minds Think Aloud reviewer, and my interest came partially from my short-lived experience as a social worker/counselor in similar facilities where they use what is called Positive Peer Culture, and yes, it is certainly its own culture. In Roaring Orchards, groups have to physically gang up on others who act out, students have to face walls, have their shoes taken away, and there is a whole esoteric dictionary of words, terms, and acronyms.

Children and staff alike in Roaring Orchards struggle with how much ‘buy-in’ to have for the schools curriculum. Students can explain the reasoning behind the therapeutic interventions, but it is certainly not something they have faith in, and ultimately they feign issues so that they can then impress their therapists and show progress. Staff spends time mocking the children and seem to be as adolescent as those they serve, some pledging allegiance to the mission but others planning to sue the facility or finally tell the administrator off and demand it close. Just as the children plot to run, staff think of leaving, turning over “states-evidence,” while those with idealistic visions are met with a steel shovel to the shins and a rude awaking. Parents who object to the punishments tone down their words when offered the chance to bring their child home, since then the rules don’t seem so bad. The ultimate existential crisis for Benjamin, and the rest of the youth, is to run, or not to run, and youth are often chased sprinting from the grounds of the school. The only true relationships in the novel are those that are undercover, with children bonding through secrets, shared rule-breaking, and secret plots to leave.

Genuine longings and hopes go unfulfilled, and it seems the author and the reader want more for these characters. The world the author has created is all game playing with various interventions that make it comically but darkly absurd. When you FIB you are using functioning intimacy blockers. Students get ghosted and nobody can speak with them since they aren’t really there. They are put in their rooms until they remember things correctly, made to sit facing corners, split up into oddly named groups, and in an incredible birthing scene gone wrong (that just may have stolen the show) students recreate their own struggles in the womb, emerge to an idealistic mother, and ‘relearn’ how to form bonds.

The author doesn’t seem to be making a statement on a boarding school, what seems to fit more is that this is just a microcosm of the world we all live in. True relationships and connections that are ached for are not found in easy, outwardly ways, feelings are feigned to get along, masks are created with beaks to appease others. Sure, we can run, but where to? We may be incapable of surviving without these rules, and we want to stick around, just to see what kind of drama happens next. The author loved all of his characters, none of them are evil, their intentions and longings are very human and even grand at times, and the dialogue between them flowed wonderfully. Ironic passages where characters are constantly feigning how they are supposed to feel, unwittingly mocking the rules, all of them aware of the absurdity, and once in while rebelling with an axe or a fire.

The oft-occurring childhood violence is not searing, nor are the actions necessarily evil, they are matter of fact, done on a whim, with little spite and seem to be the only way a student can have any true impact on the environment. When they come, they often make sense, or at least aren’t some sort of reflection of a dark human nature, and there’s just enough empathy for the children and supposed theoretical principle to the school to make it seem legit, and just enough mastery by the God of his Universe, Aubrey, to keep it going.

Aubrey, like any charismatic leader, has tremendous personal power and abilities to persuade others. He asks questions, spins truths, and interrogates others in a way that undress any last bit of defenses. Yet this God is dying, maybe losing his sanity, because when he finally lets it all explode in a bit of a mea culpa; telling the children and staff what he really thinks of them, it’s barely noticed. Their leader is lost, utterly disappointed in his failing and the flaws of those around him, but .everyone moves on without notice. This is chilling. Aubrey was maybe the best part of the novel and sprinkled about in just enough doses that you wanted more.

What made my jaw drop was actually not what was inside the novel, but when I saw that David Foster Wallace, author of Infinite Jest, has a blurb on the cover.

"Dan Josefson is a writer of astounding promise and That's Not a Feeling is a bold, funny, mordant, and deeply intelligent debut." --David Foster Wallace, author of Infinite Jest


Nuff said, right? Why is anybody else even bothering doing a review? This is Warren Buffet admiring your stock picks, and Martha Stewart oohing and awwing at your decorative dishware. Wallace is the modern day face of so called “difficult fiction,” fiction you have to work at as a reader. It was the last book blurb Wallace wrote, reportedly doing multiple rewrites to make the 22 words give the right emotional impact, and That’s Not A Feeling was perhaps the last novel he ever read, before taking his own life in September, 2008.

This novel did take a bit of work, and my guess is there will be a splatter of one and two stars or “I gave it a chance, but I just couldn’t finish it” where others will applaud the efforts and speak of its subtle hypnotizing nature. I was both of these during different moments, but I’m a marathoner, and I know that the first miles can be the toughest and once you get warmed up, it flows smooth and sweet. The novel is published by Soho Press, who pride themselves in presenting works that other houses ignore since they are not so quickly and easily digestible by the public. There’s something noble in that.

The difficult parts were the inexplicable narration change. The novel begins in third person, but then switches to first person, and the reader wonders how the narrator knows things where he isn’t even present, and how he can describe how other people felt as if he’s omniscient, . You learn later that it’s a retrospective, and at one point the narrator self- reflects about writing the actual book you are reading.

“Mr. David Wallace,” if I could only ask, “were you referring to this unusual narrative stance in your praise?” Because what I kept feeling was that the author was cheating, using the immediacy and intimacy of a first person narrative, yet also the more universal storytelling tools of the third person narrative. Despite the intrusive narrative changes, however, it was a world I don’t’ want to run from, but certainly wanted and needed to stick around, just to see how it may end. In fact, after finishing the novel, I didn’t’ want to read anything else for a bit. It felt like having a unique dish, a rarely tasted flavor in my mouth, and I didn’t’ want any new flavor to spoil it.

It seems kind of cheap to use traditional ratings to grade a non-traditional novel; to buy-in to this 5 star system for a novel that mocks superficial buy-in, but like a Roaring Orchards child I’ll play along, rather than run, and give it 4 stars, and will wait for the many future novels to see if indeed George Foster Wallace’s spirit has lived on in the body of Dan Josefson.

That’s Not A Feeling is scheduled to be released on October 2, 2012, by Soho Press.

http://www.amazon.com/Thats-Not-a-Fee...


~Mark Matthews, Author of Stray and The Jade Rabbit

[Paul Spence · Rating 3 out of 5]

Our narrator, Benjamin, is the ultimate unreliable narrator. His story is ostensibly a first person narrative, but it shifts frequently to a third person omniscient point of view, including many events, conversations and even thoughts, feelings and dreams, which Benjamin could not possibly know. He tells us early on that everything came from what he later learned or was told, but it seems improbable, at best, that head master Aubrey would have told him his dreams, for instance.

Benjamin is brought to Roaring Orchards ostensibly just for a tour, but his parents leave him behind and hurry out without so much as a goodbye, apparently on the advice of Aubrey. But even that is suspect, because Benjamin must have known that it was more than a tour, or else why would he have kicked out the window on his parents' car? Benjamin is initially placed into "Alternative Boys" dorm, the mid-level dorm for somewhat higher functioning kids. He is thrown into a world of unfathomable rules and a whole new language of allegedly therapeutic terms - mostly developed by Aubrey. Students in the dorm have to stay grouped within arm's length or else the entire group gets "hand held". Problems are addressed in "candor meetings" where everyone might have to write their "fibs" - functional intimacy blockers. Students who run or get violent may get put in a "wiggle" (another acronym, although I can't remember and can't find exactly what it stands for), get "cornered", "sheeted" or "roomed".

Benjamin makes it clear, without stating it directly, that no one at Roaring Orchards, staff or student, can be trusted. In a therapeutic milieu founded on the healing benefits of honesty, everyone exaggerates, distorts and/or outright lies. Often those lies are taken as the truth and the ordinary truth is rejected as "dishonest". Benjamin himself is (was, as he's telling us the story) a student at Roaring Orchards, so he is telling us that he can't be trusted either. Yet somehow underneath the lies and the distortions, a kind of truth emerges - a truth of enmeshed relationships, human nature and the intentional and unintentional damage we do to each other, particularly those to whom we are closest - either physically or emotionally.

Roaring Orchards is a place intended to be glorious and magical. Most of the dorms are located in the Mansion. There's also an "Enchanted Forest", a fountain, a garden and a farm on the premises. All of these elements are intended to have symbolic meaning in the students' healing process. But even in the time Benjamin is telling us about, the school is worn, shabby, almost tawdry. The carpet is fraying, additions have been added on haphazardly, the farm consists of a goat, a pig and a handful of chickens that only the maintenance man ever tends to. These faded elements too have symbolic importance.

Benjamin is telling us this story many years after he himself left the school and several years after the school was closed down completely. The buildings are still standing, but only just. The Mansion is a barren shell, so rotten that Benjamin can't even make it up the stairs safely. The Classroom Building is still nearly the way it was left, if dustier. It is there that Benjamin - now an adult - encounters some reminders and begins writing his narrative of his youth at Roaring Orchards. To whom he is writing or why is left as vague and misty as all the other senseless, tragi-comic events in the book.

This book left me feeling both pensive and wistful, but it is not a sentimental book. The book is deeply sarcastic, ironic and contemptuous of humanity, its cruelty and the possibility of healing. Yet somehow there is also something redeeming and hopeful about it. It is a book to be mulled over and peeled away in layers. It is a frustrating book, one that defies explanation, one that may leave you feeling left out of the joke.

[Andrew Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I let a fairly low (3.3ish) average Goodreads review keep me from picking this book off my shelf of to-read books for nearly two years. Simply, I wish that hadn't been the case.

As is often the case when I come to make my Goodreads notes on books, I've found someone else whose description I like so much that I've opted to simply copy it below. This books is marvelously bizarre and strangely intriguing; it fits my sense of humor and my desire to read YA fiction that stands out. It is not a book for everybody (is any?), but it is one for me. Perhaps my favorite YA text since reading Looking for Alaska now more than two years ago... I could not put it down.

"This is a pretty sneaky book because it's written with a fairly light touch. It's this sort of black-comic thing about fucked up teens in a strange alternative school that has its own particular vocabulary and bizarre systems. The whole place is ruled by a benevolent but sporadically screamy headmaster who is as wont to ramble passionately about ancient philosophy as to curse out a student for not paying attention. But the kids are like indomitably well spirited, for the most part, either taking the process seriously or else making a convincing act like they do, until all of a sudden someone is beating his roommate bloody with a curtain rod, or faking seizures so convincingly that she actually passes out, or locking himself in a closet with an ax, or stealing a razor to cut herself alone in her room late at night.

So it's a pretty intense book that masquerades as something way less intense, I guess. The Wes Anderson comparison is apt, because on the surface it reads sort of blasé and calmly kooky, but then it has this really super dark undercurrent. It gets pretty brutal, in fact, which I should have seen coming but completely didn't.

I did feel like there was a fair amount of unresolved stuff when it ended, and it's told in a strange style that's more or less first-person omniscient, which gets confusing and a little awkward when the narrator describes a scene in great detail that he then walks into. But despite that, it was so absorbing and strange, and I really liked it quite a lot."

- Goodreads user "Oriana", 16 June 2012

[Alex Van Houdt · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are real flashes of something great here. Aubrey is one of the more compelling characters I've come across with his grand presence, cruelty, truly good intentions, beliefs (a near equal mix of kooky and ones that seem to contain a simple wisdom) and impatience all tied up in one fully believable package. There are so many great dynamics at play here too: what happens as authority fades and no one is capable of filling that gap, relationships between the aimless (old and young), and what happens when no one knows what to do with them. There is also the thrill that comes with reading an author that doesn't take a safe approach.

But there's just some major thread that's missing. Outside of Aubrey and Tidbit, there are no characters with much depth, no one develops, and honestly there's hardly any plot to speak of. The book reads like a collage of random moments and non sequitors. While I could see an argument for why this story's disorganized and potentially told by an unreliable narrator, I didn't feel there was a strong enough message, or a sufficiently clear point to really hold it together. As much as I wanted to love it at times, I never left it feeling satisfied. Maybe that was the point? But even if it was, then I think it suffers because of it.

All that being said, I'd love to read another book by Josefson.