This is an absolutely HILARIOUS book about a man determined to become a famous author in order to make his ex-girlfriend – whose wedding he’s planning to attend – jealous.
This is the first in what may be a series of quotes from the book:
“Writing a novel – actually picking the words and filling in the paragraphs – is a tremendous pain in the ass. Now that TV’s so good and the Internet is an endless forest of distraction, it’s damn near impossible. Somebody like Charles Dickens, for example, who had nothing better to do except eat mutton and attend public hangings, should get very little credit.”
“That night, after dinner of leftover salmon, I reviewed the work I’d done. A lot was garbage. There were strange repetitions. The word taciturn was used four times in one sentence. Genevieve was thrice described as robin-throated. The Black Hills were said to “rise from the land like the calluses and corns and warts from God’s own foot.” In the scene in which Luke arrives on the dock at Callao, he passes some barrels. For some reason, in my frenzy I’d felt it necessary to list the contents of thirty-four of these barrels. But that was all for the editors to sort out. I’d covered ground. And there was some artful prose, too, like where I described Genevieve as singing “with the humble desperation of a grizzly wailing from a leg trap in the Alaska night.”
Really a fun read. Though it’s filled with a lot of goofy passages, the overall gist is true: it’s damn hard writing a novel.
Hilarious! I love it!