Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Having read the Amazon readers' reviews, I can tell I'm going to get flamed for this. But I am truly confused. Did these people read the same book I did? To me, it read like an airport/beach book in hack prose with arty bits about the annual migration of certain cranes thrown in. The story was just an excuse to wax philosophical about ecology, neurology and the sense of the self. The characters were mostly wax figures, dummies in a crash test. The plot, if you can call it that, can generally be described as follows: Young man "Mark" has terrible accident in a truck and suffers brain damage. When he wakes up from a coma, he believes that his sister "Karin", his dog, his house are all imposters, and that this is part of some conspiracy, the nature of which he never figures out. These are apparently symptoms of something called "Capgras syndrome," a neurological disorder that causes its victims to believe such things. None of the medical professionals in the book has ever seen this in a trauma victim. A famous neurologist "Weber" is consulted. He comes, examines Mark, performs a few tests and leaves. Karin, who gives up a job as a customer service rep (!), moves in with a man she used to know, who is currently a vegan environmentalist hippie who meditates a lot, and who was Mark's best friend growing up. There is a corresponding plot line about environmentalism versus real estate development - which will probably end badly for the cranes and the hippies. Weber returns a few times. Karin sleeps with the hippie and with another guy as well. Also, there's a character who's a nurse and has secrets to keep (revealed later, but by that time, who cares?). Eventually Mark takes medicine and is restored to sanity. More or less. There are so many things wrong with this novel, I don't know where to begin. Among other problems, there is very little character development. The sister seems like a big self-hating baby who lives a totally uninteresting life - probably because she is basically a not very interesting person. Her neurotic suspicion, that she has no personality, arises from the apparent fact that she does, in fact, have no personality to speak of. To the extent that her character is described, she appears to be an excruciating whiner. The character she sleeps with, "Daniel", is a straw man - he barely speaks or shows any emotion whatsoever (the reader is told occasionally about Daniel's emotions, but they are never demonstrated or shown). His entire purpose seems to be a listening board to Karin's self-pitying, soporific patois. Everything we know about Daniel, we know because the narrator told us. Nothing is shown; only told. Daniel doesn't do anything and barely speaks till the end, and even then it's mundane and totally overwhelmed, in any event, with Karin's relentless self-pity. Related to the author's inability to show rather than tell is that the author's characters - and the whole plot, actually - really only exist as a scaffolding for the author's musings on environmental devastation and what neurology can teach us about the sense of self. But the environmental statement is something most of us already know (real estate development is bad for migrating birds), and Oliver Sacks already told us about the fragile self in his many popular books. In fact, the character Weber is a Sacks doppelganger. We're told he goes through a lot of anguish after receiving bad reviews on his latest book. Moreover, this book is excessively slow. Most of the time we're in the characters' heads thinking thoroughly banal thougts because that's all they have in them to think about. I stuck with it though to the end, and I can confidently say that the author did not redeem himself at the end. Mark's recovery is mentioned and never referred to again. I can't even remember what happened to most of the other characters, and it's only been a week since I finished the book. I cannot emphasize enough how amazingly bad this book is. And keep in mind: if you read this, you'll never get that time back. Don't waste it.