Berengaria’s Reviews > House Mother Normal > Status Update

Nervously awaiting your review since I suggested it to you 😬. But better than "Christie Malry's..." sounds hopeful at least.

Alan wrote: "Nervously awaiting your review since I suggested it to you 😬. But better than "Christie Malry's..." sounds hopeful at least."

I can tell you now. Very interesting as a literary experiment and I think it works wonderfully well as that. The idea of lining up the pages and dialogues to match so that you could get a collective narrative (or multi-camera) look at the same hour -- nice!

However, what Johnson chose to fill that hour with it...pretty awful. And I don't mean the old folks, I mean JOHNSON.

You know, there was an urban myth about depressed DisneyWorld workers dressing up in their costumes, climbing up to the top of one of the big attractions, shouting dirty limericks for a few minutes before jumping to their collective deaths.

I don't understand the costumes and much less the dirty limericks. You have only minutes to live and you want to spend it shouting "THERE WAS AN OLD LADY FROM DUNT/ WHO HAD A HUGE HAIRY CUNT"

That's what Johnson seems to be doing in this novel. Dressing up in the costume of House Mother and yelling nothing but sexual and toilet obscenities before he jumps.

So, 5 stars for the experimentation, but only 2 for most of the content.

Oh, and you weren't the only one who didn't identify the Welsh! Several other reviewers also referred to it as "nonsense". (Don't know whether to laugh or cry there, seeing as how most of those reviews are from Brits)