Numb: A Novel

by Sean Ferrell

A captivating debut from exciting new talent Sean Ferrell, Numb is the endearing tale of a man with no memory or ability to feel pain, who attracts a colorful crowd of sycophants and exploiters while trying to come to terms with who he really is. Fans of the work of Richard Powers, Gary Shteyngart, and Thomas Pynchon—and of the films The Curious Case of Benjamin Button , The Truman Show , and the cinematic oeuvre of Charlie Kaufman—will love the unique and entertaining Numb.

Genres: Fiction

288 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 18, 2010

About the author

Sean Ferrell lives and works in New York City. He writes novels, middle grade sci-fi, and picture books.

His most recent work is The Sinister Secrets of Singe .

His novels include Man In The Empty Suit and Numb: A Novel.
His picture books are I Don't Like Koala and The Snurtch.

Sean has been published in several literary journals, including The Adirondack Review which awarded him the Fulton Prize for his short story "Building an Elephant."

Reviews

[Andrew Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

A beaten and bleeding man who, it transpires, doesn't feel pain, staggers into the company of a group of circus performers. I dont know if such a condition exists but it struck me as a great basis on which to kick off an intriguing novel. Before long the man is part of the travelling circus and we follow him and his new friends as his life is transformed by his 'gift' and as his knowledge of his previous life starts to be unveiled.

In truth, the the execution doesn't quite match the idea. We do meet an interesting group of characters and the manner in which he is absorbed into this disparate group is interesting enough. Similarly, as the background mystery is gradually unravelled the story does change direction effectively, but the problem for me was that I never managed to get inside the head of the man who feels no pain - in fact, he felt a bit like the man with no feelings, period. Ok, that may be a bit harsh but it did spoil it a bit for me.

This is Ferrell's first book and it does showcase a new(ish) writer with fantastic imagination and great ideas. His second book, The Man in the Empty Suit, really does demonstrate just how good he can be, and I absolutely loved this new take on a time travel theme. Ferrell is definitely a man to keep careful track of.

[Erica]

Numb is the story of a man who arrives at a circus with no memory of who he is and no ability to feel pain. he becomes famous because of it, all while struggling to discover who he really is (and not just in the sense of where he came from, but what kind of person he wants to be.)

I was expecting this one to have a compelling plot, but I wasn't expecting the writing to be as beautiful as it often was. Not necessarily my usual thing (though Numb does, in a way, come of age), but I definitely liked it. A quick read, too--finished in less than two days.

[Elisabeth Black · Rating 5 out of 5]

I reviewed this book on my blog, here: http://elisabethblack-writer.blogspot...

A snippet:
Ferrell's elegant and beautiful prose ensnared me from the start. Beyond the author's voice, though, there's a stillness within the narrator, a unique receptivity that counter-balances the exuberance of his adventures. And adventures there are. Numb is a serious book, but it's an exciting one too.

[Benoit Lelièvre · Rating 4 out of 5]

Praise the Gods of Social Media (and Janet Reid), I have bought Numb. Honestly, since I've begun this whole blogging thing, I've been swimming in a lake of paranormal, romance, vampires and werewolves writers. When I heard about Sean Ferrell through his agent's blog, I was curious. His approach to fiction writing seemed similar to mine. My writer-sense didn't disappoint me, because Numb is one hell of book.

Numb is the story of...Numb, some guy that walks into a freak show circus in Texas, covered in blood and wearing a black suit. He doesn't remember who he is and can't feel any pain. The circus owner sees the opportunity of a quick buck with him and includes him into the show. One day, things go overboard and Numb gets locked in a cage with the Caesar, the circus' lion. His friend Mal saves his life and drags him out of the cage and together they leave the circus to start their own roaming freak show. Numb's career goes upwards though as he hits New York and lands a contract with an agent, Michael who turns him into a celebrity. Numb gets introduced to the jet set, blind artist Hiko and model Emilia, who find a way to make his life complicated despite the newly found celebrity. Meanwhile, Mal struggles, but the bond he has with Numb proves to be stronger than his new entourage though.

The chapters of Numb draw a series of portrait of Numb's life who are loosely connected, but beautiful on their own. Most of them would make a good standalone story, which gives the novel a depth and an aesthetic that most first time novelist don't even come close to. What I liked best about Numb was Ferrell's reflexion on identity versus celebrity. All that Numb has about himself is the perception of other people, which makes him identify himself to his scars, which is the only thing people seem to give him attention for. That also causes these beautiful moment of lonely hollowness, where he's trying to "numb down" an nameless feeling (I.E. In Hiko's appartment when he turns all lights down or in the hotel where he keeps ordering stuff for no apparent reason). This is where Numb is most appealing, in its graceful impending doom. The numbness is only physical, despite the main character denying his anxiety (consciously or not).

What I liked a little less is the theoretical stance of the novel. Numb is a voice (an commanding one), but as a character, he comes off a bit more like a theoretical example than a live character to whom the reader attach. I can understand Sean Ferrell wanted (and achieved) that ethereal feeling, but there is a cost to this. I'm not even sure other characters call Numb by his name during the novel. He's mostly nameless and could have been called "loss of identity" or "existential dread" and the novel wouldn't have been affected. He doesn't seem very interested in his past and his life and seems happy to surf on the wave of his own hype. It's not that critical, but it strips the novel of a great power it could have had and traps it in this intellectual cast.

For a first novel, Numb burns rubber. It's a spectacular kick-start to Sean Ferrell's novelist career. It's not the most accessible novel and it's going to frustrate a lot of reader that aren't used to play mind games of authors, but it gets the job done. Sean Ferrell isn't dead or famous yet and it's with great pleasure that I hop into his bandwagon.

(Taken from my blog: www.deadendfollies.com)

[Colin Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

A man wanders into a circus with no memory of who he is or where he came from. All we know is that he is unable to feel pain. He is numb, and so that becomes his name. NUMB tells the story of this stranger as he goes from being one form of circus side show to another, traveling from the big top in Texas to the big city and media attention of New York. As his star ascends, the mystery of who he is and why he's numb hangs over him, waiting to be resolved.

NUMB is Sean Ferrell's debut novel. There are no high-speed chases, gripping edge-of-the-seat drama and such, but the air of mystery and intrigue carried me page to page and chapter to chapter. As I read, Numb's first-person narration betrayed a sense of numbness, indicating that whatever his mysterious "ability" was, it goes beyond a physical deadness. Something isn't right at a much deeper level. I don't think I'm giving too much away by saying that the story of Numb is the story of a search for answers on more than one level.

As I read, I kept thinking that Numb's voice was familiar. It dawned on me that he reminded me of Meursault from Albert Camus's THE OUTSIDER (L'ETRANGER). There's a matter-of-factness about the way he discusses things. It's perfect for Numb's character.

I found the way Ferrell describes scenes easy to visualize, which is important to me. I hate having to re-read sections because I can't "see" the setting in my mind's eye. He has some interesting characters, none of whom are either wholly good or totally evil. They all have different motives, with perhaps only two being anything close to what Numb might call a friend. This rings true given the world Numb inhabits and the circles in which he finds himself.

NUMB is very well written, but I would suggest it's not for everyone. Given Numb's ability and how he uses it to earn money (think hammer, nails, staple gun, and people willing to pay to have their curiosity satisfied), there are some scenes that might be too much for the squeamish. There are sex scenes, but they aren't extremely sexually explicit. The language is occasionally strong (f-words, s-words, and violations of the Third Commandment). Overall, I give it a PG15+--definitely older YA to Adult.

[Tara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Numb is a man who feels no pain and doesn’t remember where he came from or anything about his past. His only link to his personal history is a bloody business card he finds in his pocket. After performing with a circus and befriending fellow performer, Mal, the two travel to New York together. Numb’s journey to understanding himself is full of people who appear to want to help but just might have other motives for befriending him. Will Numb be able to make sense of the intentions of the people he encounters?

Wonderfully written…brilliant! Numb is a captivating novel! Readers will fall in love with Numb from the start and root for him until the end. Numb is a character that won’t easily be forgotten.

*I received the book for free through Goodreads First Reads*

[David Hebblethwaite · Rating 4 out of 5]

The titular character of Sean Ferrell’s Numb by is unable to feel pain, or to remember who he was before he stumbled, bleeding, into a circus, of which he soon became the star attraction. We join Numb as he is gearing up for his greatest stunt yet – facing off against a lion. Things don’t work out as they should, though, when the lion collapses at the key moment. As a result, Numb leaves the circus, along with his colleague Mal, and heads to New York, in search of his fortune, his identity, or… well, maybe even he doesn’t really know.

One’s natural expectation with a story like this is that it will focus on uncovering the protagonist’s past, but Ferrell’s novel isn’t like that. The man Numb is now is of greater interest to the tale than the man he used to be; when occasional clues do appear (never adding up to anything like a solution, though), they feel almost like an intrusion – which, in a sense, they are, because Numb’s greatest interest is establishing an identity for himself in the present.

Identity is perhaps the central issue of Numb the novel, as that subject impinges on each of the main characters in some way. Numb himself has to deal with becoming public property to an extent; his feats of endurance make him famous, land him appearances on TV; he becomes the star of innumerable internet videos, about which he learns only by accident, if at all – in short, Numb’s identity multiplies until there are people out there who’ve never met him, who have a more solid conception of who he is than he does himself. Numb’s situation seems to me summed up best by a passage in which he reflects on the experience of staying at length in a hotel (funded by his agent) – surrounded by luxury, everything he could want at hand, but none of it belonging to him.

Mal also has to deal with the effects of Numb’s fame, though in his case the issue is that he has fallen on hard times whilst Numb’s stock has risen; Mal takes desperate measures in an attempt to claw back his sense of self. Elsewhere, we have Emilia, a model with whom Numb embarks on something of a ‘relationship’, and whose identity appears mutable – she gains gratification from Numb’s inability to feel pain in New York, yet, when Numb meets her later in Los Angeles (where she has moved), Emilia is a much softer, more relaxed character. Then there is Hiko, the blind artist with whom Numb falls in something which is not quite love; she captures the essence of her subjects in her works, but keeps a second, private set of portraits, which sum up her own image of those people – she creates multiple identities of others.

By novel’s end, Numb is on his way to discovering who he is, or at least to becoming comfortable with whatever answer to that question he may choose – and we as readers have experienced an interesting and very entertaining examination of what ‘identity’ can mean.

[Elizabeth A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

When a bloodied stranger with no memory of who he is or how he got there wanders into Mr. Tilly’s Circus in south Texas, the only thing the battered and confused man can think to tell the curious workers who surround him is, “I’m numb.” Though he means it literally, that proclamation also comes to be his name.

Numb’s ability to absorb physical punishment without feeling the resulting pain makes for a highly successful circus act, one that finds him pounding nails through his hands and feet, making creative use of a staple gun, and acting as a human dart board for members of the crowd.

Yet it’s only when he finds himself thrust into a wrestling match with a lion that Numb finally realizes his future is going nowhere, in large part because he doesn’t know his past. And so, along with best friend and fellow circus performer Mal, Numb heads to New York City in search of his identity.

Once in New York Numb’s life changes dramatically, as what had previously made him a freak and outcast in the circus garners him popularity and fame in the big city. Be it doing television commercials, magazine cover photo shoots, or even appearing on Letterman, Numb’s problems appear to be over. And that’s when author Ferrell pulls a brilliant slight of hand, taking what initially appeared to be on the surface a straightforward “Hey, look at the freak!” story and downshifting into a much more serious gear.

Through his interactions with those he meets in NYC (his agent, who may or may not have Numb’s best interests at heart; an ambitious, and slightly psychotic, model he meets on a photo shoot; the beautiful – and blind – artist who appears to be the only one to “see” him for who he truly is) Numb comes to understand the necessity of pain; its role as the counterpoint to pleasure. Despite all his apparent success, Numb realizes he’s stuck in a limbo world of sorts, wondering if he’ll ever really be able to feel joy if he doesn’t know what it is to experience pain.

Numb is a clever, offbeat tale of a man searching – both literally and spiritually – for the answer to the ultimate question: who am I? I’ll leave it to you to discover whether Sean Ferrell allows Numb to figure out the answer to that age-old question, but I will tell you that Ferrell sure as hell has served up a book that makes you think about how we define ourselves. Is it by what’s inside, or by what is reflected back to us by others? And when an author has the chops to both entertain readers as well as make them think, that’s beautiful thing.

[Derek Gentry · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can always tell that I’m really engaged with a book when I start neglecting mundane obligations like sleep and personal hygiene in order to squeeze in more reading time. Sean Ferrell’s Numb had this effect on me, and this despite the fact that I’m a teensy bit squeamish about blood, and significantly more squeamish about people driving nails through their hands, an activity that constitutes “just another day at the freak show” for Numb’s sensory-challenged, amnesiac title character.

With its darkly funny mixture of the beautiful and the repellent, Numb is a book that makes you laugh even as you squirm, and keeps you riveted even when you’d rather look away. But as startling as it might be when Numb accidentally nail-guns himself to a tent pole, our visceral discomfort with his condition is quickly overtaken by our uneasiness about the world’s reaction to him and the series of unsavory characters who enter his life looking to use him for their own ends.

We learn early on that Numb’s inability to feel pain might be psychosomatic, and for me, that’s what really makes him interesting. Are his amnesia and his insensitivity somehow dependent on each other? Is he a superhero, a martyr, or maybe just a guy willing to destroy himself to impress a girl? And why, despite his painlessness, does he still seem so vulnerable? Fans of Chuck Palahniuk—and anyone else who doesn’t mind a little blood on the carpet—should definitely give Numb a look.

[Joemmama · Rating 4 out of 5]

He blew into the failing circus on a Texas dust storm, bleeding and battered...he said "I'm numb".
That became his name, since he did not remember who he really was, or where he came from.

Numb worked around the circus and ended up as a freak who felt no pain, nailing his hands and feet to boards. He made friends with Mal, a fire eater,and they ended up leaving the circus and going to New York together. Numb had found a bloody business card in the pocket of his suit, and was sure he would find out who he was.

Numb and Mal made money, nailing Numb's hands and feet to the bar and floor of the sleazy place, betting that he would not feel it.

Numb quickly tired of the game and went out on his own. Finding an agent, who hired PI's to check on leads into Numb's identity, he went mainstream.

Getting into a snobby crowd, Numb seemed out of his element. He moved in with a blind artist, and he became her muse. When Mal comes back into his life, Numb sees things in a different light.

The story of Numb and Mal is both sad and sometimes funny as hell. Offbeat and well written, this book was terrific!

I received this book from Erica at Harper Perennial for review. Thanks so much!

[Trisha Leigh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finished NUMB, by Sean Ferrell, over the weekend. I had no trouble getting into the descriptive, yet accessible prose. The writing is wonderfully layered; I’m still rummaging through the lingering thoughts and concerns in this novel left in the back of my mind. The story follows a man called Numb who knows nothing about his past – or why he can’t feel any pain.

As he wanders through his days amassing scars on his body and soul, Numb let’s other people control his life and decisions. He floats along, figuring when he finally discovers his past then he’ll be able to grab hold of his future.

Along the way he attains a certain amount of notoriety, none of which he desires but that he doesn’t avoid either. Sean Ferrell has a real knack for making Numb, the unapologetic narrator of the novel, likable even when he shouldn’t be. He paints the insecurities and hopes of these desperate characters in a way that makes me ache for them, root for them.

It’s a beautiful story that takes on an issue we all struggle with – that maybe it doesn’t matter who we were. We can only take control of who we are and who we want to be.

[Patty Blount · Rating 5 out of 5]

I couldn’t wait to return home from vacation so I could get my hands on NUMB. I’d pre-ordered it weeks ago but it hadn't arrived in time to pack. I read it in a single sitting the morning after I got home. If you follow Sean Ferrell on Twitter or read his blog, you probably think this guy can write. Heh. Wait until you read the book.

The aptly named lead character wanders into a circus one day, unable to remember who is he or feel any pain and soon becomes the major draw. Numb feels nothing, but Sean’s mastery of language ensures we see and feel every scar Numb collects. The story is well-told, the imagery detailed without being intrusive. Numb, as it turns out, not only feels no physical pain, he has problems feeling emotions, too. The story is less about solving the mystery of his past and more about accepting who he is now - freak? Aberration? Loner?

I cried at the end when Numb decides who he wants to be. I think Sean’s hit it out of the park with this novel and highly recommend it.

[Kristin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was touched by Numb. Initially, I was drawn to its subject: pain and after reading it, I was reminded me of the fact that to feel pain is to be human; that it’s what we all have in common. The book follows a character named Numb. Named that way because he turns up at a circus with no memories of who he is or where he came from and without the ability to feel pain. In Numb’s efforts to find an identity without pain, which is what the book asserts is necessary to the process, Numb doesn’t seem to have the ability to worry about the people (who can feel pain) that he leaves in his wake. The novel is at its best in the passages with Ferrell’s ruminations on pain. I wish he had stayed there throughout the novel and had forgone delving into fame’s place in the human experience, but ultimately for a person who’s spent a life healing wounds of the past, it was nice to be reminded that I’m human after all.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book had a strange pacing for me as a reader. Much of the text read really fast, and felt like engrossing reading with a bizarre story that followed the life and times of an interesting character. I liked the story as a whole, and enjoyed it touching cavalierly onto moral issues and letting the reader figure out how they felt about each action. The book focused on the lonely life of someone who has an interesting and fascinating gift that lands them in the public eye out of happenstance more often than other folks. Numb must learn how to survive among a group of image crazed media junkies and hangers on who waiver between seeming helpful and hurtful to his quest to find his own history and understand himself better. The open-ended way that the story leaves the reader is a fitting end to a fun, off-kilter book that I would suggest to anyone interested in reading a longer version of a short story.

[Neil Shurley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I flew through this book. Ferrell's an assured writer and his voice is strong, interesting and funny. I loved the mystical yet down to earth feel of the book and the strange journey of the narrator. It put me in mind of the work of Paul Auster, another author I love.

In Numb, Ferrell creates a sort of avatar of and commentary on contemporary culture. Numb, the character, begins life fully grown, aware of and knowledgeable about everything except his own past. He starts his life in obscurity, grows a following, and, by the power of others more than any steps he takes himself, gets dragged up the ladder of success. He ends up in the spotlight, both figuratively and literally, as Ferrell casts his glare at the absurdity of celebrity.

Filled with interesting characters and situations, it's a journey I highly recommend.

[J.C. · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lot stuffed in a small package. Don't let the page count fool you, this book will make you think - and feel - like you've read a substantial tome.

The story seems simple enough, an amnesiac who feels no pain searches for his identity, literally and spiritually. In a sense, it is the story of us all.

Forget the part about the amnesia; memory or not, searching for ourselves, understanding who we are, defining our place in life and amongst society is a timeless and ageless theme.

Ferrell gives it a new face and twist in this intriguing story meant to leave you wondering about what really matters: in terms of who we are and how we live our lives -- how important is it really to know where we came from or who we might be?

Doesn't it matter more to simply be in the moment so we can see, and enjoy, what is right in front of us every moment of every day?

[Jeremy Brooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

Numb had a very narrow narrative focus; not at all a bad thing, that gave Ferrell the canvas needed to tell Numb's and Mal's stories in some level of detail. It's far from an action book; the tension comes from how Numb feels about his disorder, how he relates to people, how they relate to him, if he can overcome his emotional numbness, since it seems he's stuck with his physical one. There didn't seem to be much anticipation around Numb learning his identity, which kind of sapped the tension out of that arc a bit. Overall a good book, though. Ferrell writes in the style that I tend toward myself (stories driven by broken characters, minimal action), so I guess he gets an extra point for that.

[Mav Skye · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sean Ferrell grabs you by the collar and forces you to feel the physical, psychological, and emotional pain that Numb is unable or unwilling to feel. He jars you with the bizarre, distracts you with pretty women, and while you’re looking the other way, pounds nails into your heart. Unlike Numb, you feel each swing of the hammer. It’s like Palahniuk meets Steinbeck in a lion cage. They sit, have coffee, and play chicken with a pairing knife. You are wondering who is going to lose a finger and if the other will sew it back on. The read is refreshing and real, and I can honestly say I can’t wait for his next book.

[Jonas Samuelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was intrigued to find that the title character's condition goes much deeper than the synopsis implies. The author never says it outright, but Numb's emotions seem to have been stilted as well, always drifting somewhere in the vague midland of feeling.

He (Numb) wanders through the story in a reflective lethargy, letting the whims and desires of others dictate his actions. Ferrel does a good job of making the reader wonder how much our individual identity depends on our ability to feel pain.

The craft and cleverness of this debut makes me wish I couldn't feel jealousy.

[Travis · Rating 4 out of 5]

The beauty of this book is in the prose. Mr. Ferrell tackled a difficult task, writing a first person narrative of a man who is unable to feel physical pain, and gave us a book that a reader feels with every word. Numb, the title character, is a troubled soul and while his flesh is incapable of feeling both his soul and psyche ache with alarming clarity. A great read and worthy of at least 4.5 stars.

[Boston Book Bums · Rating 3 out of 5]

Numb is a book that reads like a strangers journal placed in your hands. Ferrell’s oddly unfeeling world is engrossing, without using any story telling cliches to evoke emotional responses. Ferrell seems to challenge the reader, go ahead read this book and experience it as Numb would. And that is pretty damn difficult and pretty damn skillful of Ferrell.

[Dana Elmendorf]

Dark. Obscure. Twisted. Erotic. It's the grim tale of how pain, or a life without, can make you numb, emotionally and physically. It's a book full of left field WTF's that keep you turning the page. Dumbfounded after reading it, I just need time to process. But I'm glad I immersed my brain.

[Harley May · Rating 5 out of 5]

Numb is addictive and beautifully told. Ferrell writes characters that are identifiable, yet unique. His world is familiar, but fresh. Numb is laced with dark humor, gorgeous depth, and gritty pathos.

It is a novel readers would be grieved to go through life without.

[Renda Dodge · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this book enough to keep reading. There was enough of a question about the character and why he was in the situations he was in to keep me intrigued. I liked the writing and character enough to say that enjoyed the book, even though the hook that pulled me in was never answered.

[Rise · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the Bruce Willis movie Unbreakable, my favorite from among the nocturnal ventures of M. Night Shyamalan, a train derailed and collided with an oncoming. One man, David Dunn, survived the crash; everyone else on board was killed. Dunn was unscathed. He doesn't have a single scratch or bruise on him whatsoever. We learn later that he has superpowers. Later, David was stalked by a sinister character, Elijah Price, played by Samuel L. Jackson. This character has brittle bones and he can easily be hurt by the most benign of causes. He has a medical condition called osteogenesis imperfecta. He has the most fragile constitution that is always on the brink of breakage. They call him Mr. Glass.





In the Sean Ferrell novel Numb, a man suddenly materialized out of a car accident, his origins unknown. We do not even know if he's a refugee from Krypton. This man is numb. He cannot feel any pain. He is a walking painkiller. He is diagnosed with a condition called congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis. His name is Numb.

The problem with Numb is not that he is numb, but that he is a magnet for disaster. He can be cut, wounded, hit, ran over, kicked, slapped, knifed, nailed, punched, burned, inflicted with every imaginable assault. But it won't make a difference. He is untouchable.

I must have lost a lot of blood reading Numb. You know, squinting my eyes every time the tingle of imagined pain travels from the stressor to the nerves, propagating through the nervous channels, right up to the brain center of activity, down the spinal column, and back to the dendrites and axons of the skin muscles which felt the stimulus and, being stimulated, twitched and contracted and felt the final irrevocable pain. Numb can't feel them but I, reader, can. It's making me touchy.

Numb is an anti-graphic novel, an intelligent one. An anti-graphic in the sense that it offers a send-up to the concept of superheroism in books and films and graphic media. For a first-time novelist, Sean Ferrel does it with supernatural ease. The entire set up for the hero is complete. Here's a list.

The costume: Check. See the book cover for the first Numb costume. Pants torn by tiger claws, complete with red scratches. There are more fancy "suits" Numb gets to try out in the book. They all looked good on him. There is even one for the pair of him and his sidekick parodying the caped crusader and the bird-crested boy.

The make up: Check. Ever arrived for a photo shoot with surgical threads dangling out from a freshly stitched wound on the forehead? Or with holes in the palms of the hands and soles of feet, just like Jesus resurrected and taunting the doubting Thomas. Or trailing with blood down hospital corridors, smearing the floors with "bloody footprints." It's cool.

The sidekick: Check. A man named Mal, the Spanish word for "evil." The name sends signals that this guy Mal is more than the usual Jimmy Olsens and Sancho Panzas. Hell, this sensitive friend could be the archenemy himself masquerading as a friend. The evil guy Mal is an anti-sidekick. He's the one who supported Numb during his first sally with the first enemy: a tiger in a cage. Then due to irreconcilable differences, he and Numb had a falling out and parted ways, but later they reunited for several more sallies. Don't sidekicks stay with the hero till the end? This one is different. The sidekick has his own mind, his own pain trips and "power trippings." He is a sidekick who wants to kick Numb aside. There's their misadventure of the spontaneous combusting engine, the misadventure with the murky waters via bungee jumping, and a final unforgettable sally that marked Numb for life and Mal for death. Mal is the narcissistic hunger artist who is his own hero. A perfect foil for Numb's understated powers.

The love interest: Check. A blind woman and budding artist named Hiko. Sculptress of found objects, including Numb. Her installation artworks have more than an aesthetic function to the novel's forward motion. Her sharp pieces double as performance art to Numb's artless actions. Hiko's found art is a mechanism that drives the book's found direction, its love interest. There are uncommissioned pieces of things in the book that suspiciously function as pieces of art: the bungee jump harness left hanging for a while in the chair, the TV draped with pages torn from a book of Braille. Numb's body is an artwork in itself. It's target practice, open to all interpretations of pain, repository of all kinds of sharp objects.

The third party: Check. Emilia: the model with long fingernails and long legs. A tigress: she is no Catwoman. Perhaps the second villain in the story after the tiger (but really there are so many hidden villains here it's hard to not label everyone around Numb as villain, including the writer who plotted everything down pat and the reader who relished the benumbing turns of events). Anyway, Emilia. Lust, caution. She instigated a sexconflict in Numb that sets Numb on direct course to selfdestruction. Here, the classic lament of antiheroes. The only enemy is one's self, overcome yourself and you are Zen-certified.

The power: Check. As described, the inability to feel any pain. But the scratches, bites, slits, wounds, gashes, scars are still manifest on the body.

The weakness: Check. Numb's loss of memory, or his lack of it in the first place. He doesn't know who he is other than being the numb Numb. If not for that, he is good to go. Only, the pain does not always come in the form of physical pains. It also comes as a multitude of pains in the ass that surround him and dictate to him what to do with his life. He has his agent who looks after his business interests (which means finding sources of more pain). There are unknown cameramen who follow him wherever there's a small chance he'd sprain his ankle or twist his elbow.

Having no past, his privacy is secure. But the ongoing present, the blow-by-blow moment, is his past. Numb, pain personified, is the dream of reality television. He brings the circus to the tube. He grants interviews but is asked to sit on a chair studded with 2-inch nails pointing up. Escaping from the circus, he lands on television and magazines, staffed by the same carnies. The PPV viewers pay per pain just to see his perforated flesh and relish the open skin. Don't people just love to project their pain on someone else?

The power and the weakness of Numb do not at first mix well. But later on in the novel, after his hardships and mal-adventures, we get the sense that the states of numbness and amnesia may not be mutually exclusive after all. That is, being numb is being forgetful. The absence of memory presupposes the absence of pain. For what is numbness but forgetting pain, not being able to process the hurt, the condition of invincibility. What is more painful for Numb is not that he is being wounded on all sides, but his inability to express his pain. More than losing his sense of touch, he is out of touch. Insensate, he lost a sense of reality. He became unresponsive to his own needs and those of the person he loves. He lost his sensitivity; he became an insensitive monster. His numbness overtook not only the physical, but his mental and emotional domains, too. Comes the all too painful realization: Oh my god I created a monster inside my own invincible body. I am the villain. I am the bad one. I am Numb.

The villain. Check. For one, there's tiger Caesar in the cage. But the tiger and the aforementioned tigress are only physical manifestations of villainies. There is a higher order in the spheres of superpowers and allied sciences. It's a sticky thing. There are many candidate villains in the story. There is a commentary here about the mass media exploiting the abnormalities and special abilities of people. The commodification and marketing of pain. Numb is being branded as a product, the new miracle man. Carnies flock like vultures around the dead flesh of human numbness, while the carnivores-viewers consume the pains of others like vegetarians devouring leaves.

The novel's strength and weakness are in its use of language. Numb as a character disengaged from his own physical situation is well described early on. This is when our hero accidentally nailed himself to a pole. He was trying to stick a tent flap to a pole using a nail gun.

I was embarrassed. The others already teased me about not knowing how to tie decent knots. Now I was stuck to a pole. I pulled my hand hard, but the nail was deep in the wood. The skin was purple and getting darker. I pulled at it more but thought the flesh would tear before the nail came out, so I stopped. I was surprised by how much stretch there was in skin.

The last sentence perfectly captures not only Numb's clumsiness in the job but also his, well, numbness. The book is well written but is marred by explaining too much its rhetorical flourishes. Some sentences tend to squeeze in the meanings of words, instead of letting them speak out for themselves. Early on, for example, when Mal picked out the piece of glass protruding from Numb's back, he said to the guy, "I don't know what you're up to, but you're not gonna start making keepsakes out of the things that hurt you." Numb then follows this through with a thought: "I knew he wasn't only talking about the glass. He didn't like Darla ..." Ferrell could have kept the word "keepsakes" as it is; its intended irony would have been more effective when information that was already sensed by the reader was withheld. Another example: Before the fight with Caesar the tiger, Mal again had to mind Numb's injury: " 'You'll want to clean out that cut,' Mal said. 'You don't want to get an infection before your big day.' He said 'big day' as if he were spitting the words out, as if they tasted wrong." The "big day" could have been left with its meaning sinking through without spitting out its ironic sense the way Mal bitterly delivered the words out.

These minor points aside, this novel holds its own as something unexpected in literary fiction. It brings fresh perspectives on the literal pain of heroes in novel ways.

Wouldn't it be great if Night directed the movie of Numb? With Jim Carrey playing him, like, laid-back. It's slightly right up their alleys, no. But Numb's handlers in the book seem to have their own ideas. There are suggestions of a possible "Will Ferrell vehicle" or a Farrelly Brothers flick. But with script written by novelist Sean Ferrell, who knows more than his alliterative affinities, it would be a nice Ferrell-Farrelly-Ferrell combination. Far-fetched?




Going back to Unbreakable... Dunn and Elijah's many encounters in the movie culminated in a confrontation that unveiled the definition of their roles in the world, the meanings of their in-born powers. It is a scene well prepared in advance, the only possible conclusion between the clashing will powers of two identities, two opposable thumbs. Unbreakable enacts its own template of the comic book enterprise.

Whereas the movie is concerned with the nature of heroes and villains as the natural state of things, the book Numb does not have a neat black and white distinction in its moral compass. There is only a broad spectrum of shades of gray in its human scale. The book is so laden with comic inconsistency as to be a Will Ferrell slapstick. I think it's more like a Colin Farrell fit.

In Numb, the roles are played out in the less discrete analogues of heroes and villains in society. It is a more earthy state of man in a comic situation, less rigid in its distinction, and thus less clean and more blood. The hero-villain fills up his own niche according to his capacity to dole out sympathy and rise above his benumbed state and act in accordance to what decency dictates. Mal and Numb are not totems of good and evil but the potentialities of good and evil. Numb enacts its own comedy of existence.

"[This] book has a lot of heart," says the enthusiastic front cover blurb. It has that, yes. More. It's got some little bits of soul in it too.


First posted in blogspot:
http://booktrek.blogspot.com/2010/09/...

[Emily McAlister · Rating 5 out of 5]

I feel like I've been looking for a story like this forever, and I read it in a night. I don't think I put it down once.

[Nick Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sean Ferrell has a way with words and incredibly complicated characters. He takes a simple, yet fascinating idea, in this case, a man who feels no pain, and turns it into someone we can all relate to. He makes the impossible relatable.
Numb is an emotional journey that kept me on the edge of my seat. It’s a rush of empathy for every character and their simultaneous impossible personalities that you can easily identify with.
It has a ton of heart, while being clever, witty, and tricking you into reading a sappy emotional story.

[Stephen Dorneman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting concept - a man appears out of nowhere with the inability to feel pain, joins a circus and eventually becomes a national celebrity - but overwriting and character implausibility detract too much from the story. Great depictions of NY and LA, plenty of blood and gore without being gratuitous, but too many people are doing wacky things without explanation, there's a first person narrator who's passive to a fault, and editing /continuity errors that finally doom this first effort by Ferrell. Ambitious, but not recommended.

[Marie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Numb was a good read and I wish I could give it a 3.5 instead of just a 3, but I'm reserving my 5 star ratings for books that completely and totally floor me and so very few books will rate a 5. Numb by Sean Ferrell deserves more than a 3, but is not quite a 4. I enjoyed it but I think its numerical rating suffered because I kept comparing it to The Samaritan by Fred Venturini--which I would definitely rate a 5. Of course, in the interest of full disclosure, I must tell you that Blank Slate Press is publishing The Samaritan--due out in Feb, 2011--so one could argue that I am biased....

Ferrell does a good job of getting inside Numb's head and allowing us to feel what it's like to not feel. But he had to walk a fine line between conveying to the reader the physical abuse Numb experienced without describing the excruciating pain we would feel. Because of that, I felt there was too much of a distance between this reader and Numb. Although the books are very different, the mental pain and anguish that the main characters experience was much more real and visceral to me in The Samaritan. Both books also have a buddy element--Mal in Numb and Mack in The Samaritan--and here again there were vague similarities in the roles the buddies play and in the motivations for their actions. But I felt that Mack's human frailties were both more frankly and more subtly addressed than Mal's. We never really learn, at least to this reader's satisfaction, what ultimately motivated Mal.

As for the romantic element, I never fully understood why Numb's girlfriend, a blind sculptor who is an up and coming luminary in the New York arts scene, was so attracted to him. There didn't seem to be much chemistry between the two of them other than a sort of comfort level between two people who were different/outsiders. Because of that lack of passion or even evidence of real affection, I didn't understand why she would so willingly take him back at the end.

[Heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Numb" is the journey of an amnesiac who can't feel pain. He has no recollection of his true identity or where he came from, so he does what any lonely person with a unique talent has at least thought of doing, he joins the circus. During his time in the circus, we begin to see that the people around him tend to use him for their own gain. He cannot feel pain but he does come away with many horrible scars that serve as a reminder. After an incident in the lion's cage, Numb (as he has come to be known), and his friend Mal head to New York City with a single clue to Numb's former life, an old, bloody business card. In New York, Numb is overwhelmed with how much the people around him use his sudden fame to make money. They nail him to bars for money despite his protests. Finally, Numb gathers the courage to break his ties with Mal. He gets himself an agent and a girlfriend, and things seem to be really looking up.
"Numb"is a wild ride in one man's search for identity. Along the way we see how it feels to be used for fame and fortune. Although Numb can't feel physical pain, this story is all about the emotional struggles he has. Even when Numb was doing stupid things like cheating on his sweet, blind girlfriend, I couldn't help but feel sorry for him. Ferrell did a great job of creating a flawed but likable protagonist. There was nothing amazing about this book, but it was a quick read that I found interesting. "Numb" offers a different take on human nature that I found refreshing, albeit dark. It's hard to imagine the condition Numb is in, desperately wanting to feel the pain that others feel. If you're squeamish, you may have some difficulties getting through this one as it's quite graphic at times. Ferrell is a great new writer that I'm excited to see more from.