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epitome of incomprehensibility
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A guessing game, if anyone wants to play!
Nostalgia and a conversation with my brother brought me back to this book - although I probably focus on different things in it than I used to: namely, parallels between characters rather than the style(s).
Okay...so S. is 22, having not too long ago returned to his home country from abroad. He has two roommates he can't quite like. The one you'd think he'd get along with better, irreverent med student B., has wounded him by making light of his mother's recent death. He had big ambitions for creative work - still does, but grief and a need to make a living have him a bit more subdued than he was a couple of years before. At the moment, he's working as a teacher.
L. is in his mid-thirties, married and working at a newspaper. If S. represents the book-smart side of the author, maybe L. represents the street-smart side. His thoughts carry on an often hilarious running commentary on everything he's doing, prompting hordes of literary critics to armchair-diagnose him with ADHD (okay, maybe that was just me). Suspecting his wife of cheating on him, he seems weirdly resigned. Why? Does the idea turn him on? Not always, no, but sometimes...after all, it's a running joke that he's goofily horny. His own cheating attempt is an exchange of faintly suggestive anonymous letters, and at one point he's sexually attracted to a bar of soap in his pocket. Maybe.
But there's a grief he and his wife M. are dealing with, largely unspoken: their son died a few years ago. Since then, they haven't been intimate - in a sexual way, but not only.
To give a high-school theme statement: the book shows how different people have worlds of thoughts that overlap in ways they don't expect - and might never know, if they don't communicate. Will talking solve that? Maybe, maybe not; sometimes people can't always frame their thought-world in a way that someone else's thought-world will recognize and accept.
I haven't talked about M., but she shares something with S. that L. doesn't: no, those two aren't romantically involved (M. wonders at one point if they could be, though in the story they barely meet). They both possess creative ambitions that are limited by their place, class, and other responsibilities. Both of them have sacrificed themselves for loved ones - and both have also disappointed them.
Or, in Not Another Teen Movie style:
-S. is the Nerd
-B. is the Snarky Sidekick
-L. is the Nerd with a Hat
-M. is the MILF
(Is that what Not Another Teen Movie would do? I mean, give the female character the "characterization" of sexy and nothing else? Maybe it's what the movies they're parodying would do. I don't know, I only saw the cover of the thing.)
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