As usual, you can never go wrong with Tim!!!

maybe it's when i read this but the portrayals of the women felt so hard and not great to me. from Sarah to Bobbi and then the girls locked in the room when the main character has his breakdown.

I liked best the descriptions of his family growing up, especially his dad, and all the relationships between physical and emotional feelings. Those were really good, and the existential fear.

This isn't as strong as O'Brien's other work; sections of it feel like incomplete drafts, like he left them to be developed later but never got around to actuall doing that. The extended flashback, which takes up most of the novel, is potent and draws big emotions from small brushstrokes, which is typical of O'Brien at his best. The present-day framing device, though, didn't engage me and I thought the wife and daughter characters weren't too convincing.

Not my favorite. A paranoid little boy (William?) protects himself from nuclear holocaust and grows up paranoid; digs a bomb shelter, traps his wife and kid in the house. Semi-well written.

I'm a big fan of O'Brien, I've taught his work, Things and Into the Lake of the Woods are classics, but I have to admit that this one didn't really work for me.

It's well written, and has some wonderful lines ("In a sense, I realized, cheerleaders are terrorists. All that zeal and commitment." "Parents could be absolutely merciless. They just kept coming at you, wearing you down, grinding away until you finally crumbled.") It has valid psychological insights, even amidst the exaggeration and satire. It expresses the Dantesque view that everything is motivated by love, even when that converts to the fear of the loss of love. I get that. Elements of first-rate fiction.

My first issue is with the tone. This seems to be going for Antrim/Leithauser/Vonnegut-ish satire, with a hapless POV character struggling to make sense of the world. That can be a tricky path to follow, since something needs to keep the reader interested. I lost interest.

Second, we have an unreliable narrator, and he's mentally unstable. (As an aside, I've been reading too many literary stories in the last few months where the POV is mentally unstable. DSM-X is nonfiction. If the diagnosis is the theme, I don't see the point.) Also, he's a jackass; even if he's shy and un-self-certain. He keeps enabling killing, while begging off when the responsibility gets too close. This does not make me care.

Third, since the narrator is unreliable, and sees things that aren't there, and since "imagination" keeps coming up, we basically can't really tell how much of this story is "real." It could all be one of his dreams, and boy is that a bad cliché. It's hard to retain interest when you don't trust, or even like, the narrator, and don't know if the story can be taken seriously anyway. And if it can't, then we're back to whatever DSM Manual was in effect that year.

Fourth, we have the plot and thematic material for a long short story, which seems stretched into a novel. Basic story is the guy is digging a hole in the backyard, and we have to personify the hole and give it dialogue, and cram in about 150 pages of backstory (which is far more interesting than the hole) to get a book. So, it's thin, and very, very repetitive. It's nice that some of the repetitions are meant to be structural, but it's very repetitive, still.

Fifth, the story involves a manic pixie dream girl, the sexiest cheerleader from high school and then college; who, of course, falls for our hapless narrator. Hunh. That trope is okay for a movie, but it wears thin at novel length, at least for me. And then, guess what?, we get a second manic dream girl, with pixie features. I pretty much threw in the towel at that point.

And that brings me back to the tone. This is over-the-top, but it sticks to the style of deadpan realism, so it was impossible for me to buy in to the over-the-topness; because it wasn't arch enough, often enough. (Antrim, in Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World is a great example of getting that balance right.)

So the experience was that many of the pages were engaging, but it kept running off the rails. Not my cup of tea.

A story about the life of a schizophrenic man. I did not like the ending. It felt like the author didn’t know how to end it. It felt like a cop out. It also has a few loose ends, specifically with his psychiatrist. It was ok.

This is an entertaining and thoughtful book, in spite of all the clunkier shifts in the plot. I like Melanie – she’s a very believable 12-year-old, willing and capable of calling her Dad the loony that he is. And I can sympathize with Dad as the paranoid protagonist. It’s both sensible and sad to witness his breakdown as he struggles to protect his loved ones against the threat of nuclear annihilation.

Then again, I’m not so keen about the “listen to the hole” soliloquies. And Mom is a persistent drag, a caricature femme fatale.

The further the plot moves away from the family core, the more contrived it feels. The Cold War leftist guerrilla tangent fits perfectly into Dad’s world view, but it’s much less successful as a believable outgrowth of his particular experiences.

Sally the unattainable cheerleader turned Patty Hearst is an annoying wrench in his Brave Bungled New World. And really, a nuclear warhead makes its way from the Florida guerrilla hideout to Dad’s Montana toolshed?

Oh well, pigheaded determination in the face of disbelief is a core value of paranoia, and this book is credible enough on that count.