Couple o' Book Reviews

There are a lot of books that start out with a strong premise, but fail to deliver on what should be an inventive story. Count How I Became A Famous Novelist by Steve Hely in that category.

The book centers on Pete Tarslaw, an office drone who decides to write “the best sellingest best seller of all time.” His motives are mainly based on a desire to show up at his ex-girlfriend’s wedding as something more than just a seat at the singles table, and a belief that he’s discovered the perfect con: writing novels.

Now, this could have been a funny story, but it comes off as almost insulting. Pete’s cynical views on the publishing world (while probably correct) are supposed to be witty, but instead come off as too glib to be satire. This is parody and not particularly brilliant at that. I’ll give Hely points for doing pretty decent caricatures of famous novelists, but none of makes any lasting impression.

The main problem is the characters. Hely never tells the reader why Pete is so hung-up on his ex-girlfriend. There’s no hint as to what they were like together, and if they had something special, or if she was just his last real girlfriend. Pete’s character in general is pretty unlikable, and even when he’s supposed to become sympathetic, he just sounds whiny.

The best part of the book is the fake New York Times bestseller list he creates on page 43.

Hely name-checks plenty of real authors in his book, like Stephen King, Cormac McCarthy and James Joyce – enough to know that he has real respect for artists who really can create something meaningful. At the novel’s end, as Pete describes a book that actually matters, he says, “I wish I’d written something that good."

Me too.

Ryan Boudinot’s Misconception is a “coming of age” story that never grows up to equal books that have done way better before – see J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey. The story has basically all been done before, and the characters are too flat to garner any real attention from the reader.

The book is about Cedar Rivers and Kat Daniels, two adults who shared a turbulent high school summer together, and are reconnecting twenty years later, because Kat is writing a book about it, and needs Cedar’s promise that he won’t sue.

The rest of the story is told in flashbacks – with a return to the present here and there – about their budding romance and the totally messed up summer that totally ruins everything. Like I said, the plot is all too familiar - without giving everything away, see Juno for a far better take on one of the novel’s main subjects.

The thing that kills the story are the characters, who despite going through some pretty horrific stuff, don’t seem affected (in the past, or present) at all. Parents get divorced, children run away, there’s child abuse and pretty much everything else you would expect from a Dateline special, but none of it appears to change the characters in anyway. “Cardboard cutouts” is the phrase that comes to mind.

This is a shame, because there were several parts of the novel that had me chuckling out loud, especially in the beginning, but it all fizzles out to grey by the book’s end.

There’s too little here to make the reader really care about anything that’s going on.

Sadly, the novel’s title says it all.