Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

There were two advantages to reading this book on a Kindle. One is that it's damn heavy. I didn't have to strain my hands to hold up the 720 page tome. Second, I could do a search for a phrase that runs like a refrain throughout this turgid read: "I'm so sorry." The tormented Jude tells Willem "I'm so sorry." He tells Harold "I'm so sorry." Harold tells Jude he is "so sorry." Willem tells Jude he is "sorry," and JB tells Jude he is sorry and Jude tells the ever-patient doctor who practices for free and is available to him 24/7, "I'm sorry." Doing a search on Kindle, there were 193 "I'm sorrys" in this 720 page book about a sorry bunch of characters, the sorriest of whom is the book's centerpiece, Jude St. Francis. Here is the book in a nutshell without revealing the big spoilers: Jude managed to escape a childhood of sexual abuse piled upon sexual abuse spiced up with beatings and then goes on to a charmed adulthood in which he cannot ever escape his past and must abuse himself, through cutting his flesh to ribbons. He finds romantic love with his friend, Willem, one of the four college suitemates, but he can never accept the fact that he is loved or offer himself sexually without feeing shameful and ugly. I would be much more interested in a character who found it impossible to believe he was lovable without a cartoonish history in which EVERYONE he ever encountered turned out to be an evil pedophile: all the brothers at the monastery, all the counselors at a home for orphans, all the truck drivers who pick him up while hitchhiking, and the sadistic doctor from whom he makes his escape. They all seem to find Jude St. Francis irresistible! I know people, good, kind people, who were not abused and yet who are unable to believe they are lovable, and I find their stories more interesting than Jude's in this plodding novel in which the author doles out the sad, sordid and ugly portions of Jude's past between stories of his shining present. And man, are these boys, who seem to have gone to Harvard together, charmed. They seem to magically leap into success in their fields, as artist, as architect, actor and lawyer. And yet, the only one the author draws with any depth is Jude. All of the rest of the characters, perhaps except for Willem, who is mainly characterized by a confounding interminable niceness, are flat. Malcolm. JB. Richard. The author almost never heeds the old "show, don't tell" saw for writers because she endlessly sums up the doings of the four. "And then Richard was there and Phaedra and Black Henry Young or Asian Henry Young." She plops in a litany of names, of conversational topics, rather than writing any great snappy dialogue. They go to Truro. They go to Cambridge for Thanksgiving. On and on. And again and again Jude behaves abominably to those who care for him and again and again they enable him. A responsible doctor would have had Jude committed from the moment he saw his gashed and scarred body, but for some odd reason,this masochistic/angelic doctor will minister to him and even put off his own retirement to tend to Jude's self-inflicted wounds. The tie between Willem and Jude is inscrutable. They snicker to each other and kick each other under the table like little boys, but other than that, it's hard for me to see the connection between them. What does Willem see in Jude? So, let's talk about sex. I associate sex with life or at least a little sex with a little life, but the men in this quartet are sexless. We hear about JB's string of boyfriends but there is no sexual vibe coming from that quarter, just the antics of a clownish queen. And how can such an acclaimed actor as Willem, someone with enough smarts to get inside the skin of every character he plays,not know that his partner hates having sex with him. Even someone with the emotional life of a squid knows when someone hates having sex. Malcolm is also presented as having no or only a tepid sexuality, his marriage to Sophie (and who IS Sophie or any woman in this book??) feels like an arranged one. The events in the book also don't take place in the real world. What year is it? There is never any sense of the characters' engagement with the spirit of the times, politics, pop culture, trends. The characters live in a hermetically sealed little world of wealth and privilege. I could go on and on (like this book does), but I'll spare you. Please do not waste the estimated 14 hours Kindle thinks it takes to finish this book. Go out and look around. Have sex. Have good conversation. Have a little life.