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Title: The Horned Man: A Novel by James Lasdun ISBN: 0-393-32438-9 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: May, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.7 (33 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: Promises much, delivers little
Comment: I rate this book a "two" instead of "one" because of the prose (good quality for a more literary-type novel, though not outstanding) and the character development afforded the main character, Lawrence Miller. Alas, no other characters are afforded much character development, a common plight in first-person narratives.
I must agree with another reviewer: this book was a waste of several hours. Rather than being a page-turner, at a few points I was sorely tempted to put the book down and never pick it back up, but the mysterious plot promised such a resolution that I grimly pressed on.
Imagine my disappointment when the promised resolution fizzled out to a nothingness which still somehow managed to strain the few stringy lines of credibility left. All that remained of the story for me, in the book's aftertaste, was a disjointed series of psychological disturbances huddled in the brain of the main character.
Lawrence is written as a highly credible character, a feat worth mentioning since little else in the book seems to be realistic. There are many references to him hiding things from himself. He hides an important phone bill underneath some disks on his bedside table. He somehow has misplaced his relationship with his own mother to the point that he no longer knows her address, but he doesn't remember how this came about. A professional therapist continuously presses him to tell her if he is sexually attracted to her. (If you know anything about the profession, you would know a real professional in the therapy field would very rarely utter anything similar to this.) A rank-smelling man camps out in Lawrence's office at the college, in a hiding place of which Lawrence is well aware, and what action does Lawrence (that reasonable, credible man) take? Does he rip open the hiding place and confront the man? Does he wait behind the door until the man comes in to slip into the hiding place, and then confront him? No! He hangs out in his office, thinking, reading, working in full view of the hiding place, and then, even better -- during his off-hours he wildly roams New York City trying to find clues about the fellow's existence and where he could possibly be. When a woman at the college expresses strong romantic interest in him and he later finds out she is in possession of a letter to her allegedly written by him, a letter which at one point is in the same room with him, does he utter the fact that he has not written her a letter? No! Although he feels no attraction to her and several times refers to her dumpy appearance, he goes about acting as though he did.
I DID like the main character's few ruminations on his wife (now separated), Carol. More would have been nice.
I don't want to spoil the ending (as if I could), but in the end nothing is explained except that some people unexpectedly have it in for Lawrence, and something highly implausible grows out of one of Lawrence's bodily appendages.
A disappointing piece of tight, implausible madness.
Rating: 4
Summary: What World Are We In?
Comment: Lawrence Miller is a professor of Gender Studies at a small New York college. Except for his recent separation from his wife life seemed fairly normal for professor Miller. Then the book mark in his book seems to have moved from one place to another. A coin vanishes from his office and he mistakes another woman for his therapist. Strange things happen in this novel, and the reader is never sure whether the tale is fixed in an objective reality or rather the subjective reality of Dr. Miller. Someone seems to be inhabiting his office at night. Certainly the pile of excrement found on his desk one day would seem to indicate that. Did his new woman friend have an accident on a trip or was she murdered in her home? Why did Miller steal his neighbor's glass eye? And what is the relevance of a strange key that pops up in his campus mail box?
Told in the first person the story is indeed puzzling, and the increased information provided as the story develops simply increases our head scratching perplexity. Is our narrator the rather reserved man that he appears to be our is he a dangerous schizophrenic? Order degenerates into disorder. Can we expect a tidy resolution from such confusion? Well, that is the big question.
Author Lasdun keeps the reader in several layers of suspense, in this rather surreal novel. Don't let my terms of "surreal", "disorder" and "subjective reality" scare you away. This is an accessible novel that uniquely explores the mind of its narrator.
Rating: 3
Summary: Does this mean he won't get tenure?
Comment: I think that this book is considerably overrated by the reviewers. I read it complete in about four hours. The initial setup is good, and some of the flashbacks are engrossing -- more engrossing, in fact, than the main narrative line of the story. There is also a fine description of political- correctness-induced paranoia and continual self-monitoring for unconscious violations; that issue would have been a better subject for the whole story, but it becomes less and less relevant as the story progresses.
I believe that fully a third of the text, consisting of repetitive ruminations and descriptions of his mood, could have been omitted without loss, indeed it would have improved the pacing of the story. The book is told entirely from the narrator's physical viewpoint. None of the other characters have depth or dimension to them -- they are there simply as plot devices.
The flavor of the narrative is consciously Kafkaesque (helpfully pointed out by a subplot involving a stage production of a Kafka story). It could have used a healthy dose of Dostoyevsky, that is, the story would have been much more dimensional if the narrator had any awareness or conscious purpose in his conduct.
Other novels of academia that I would recommend: The Blue Angel, by Francis Prose, is a better satire of academia's infestation by political correctness and resulting paranoia. For a hilarious account of academic personalities and politics, nothing tops Richard Russo's Straight Man. For the mind of the criminal -- see Dostoyevsky's Raskolnikov, who was, after all, a student.
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Title: Besieged by James Lasdun ISBN: 039332074X Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: July, 2000 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Big If by Mark Costello ISBN: 0156027798 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 01 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Century's Son: A Novel by Robert Boswell ISBN: 0312422318 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 01 July, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: What Was She Thinking?: Notes on a Scandal: A Novel by Zoe Heller ISBN: 0805073337 Publisher: Henry Holt & Company, Inc. Pub. Date: 01 August, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.00 |
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Title: Spies: A Novel by Michael Frayn ISBN: 0312421176 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 18 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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