This is my first bingo square attempt, for having been shortlisted for the Man Booker prize. And boy oh boy am I not surprised this didn’t get it. I liked Then We Came To The End well enough; The Unnamed slightly less so. But MAN did I not care for this book.
The plot revolves around our dentist protagonist and his attempt to track down the identity thief posting cultish religious (or anti-religious? The book insists it’s sort of both but reading this thing through the one time was enough and I’m certainly not going back to check) screeds in his name.
The book is ostensibly humorous, but I refuse to subscribe to the idea that crazy things happening to a boring person is the driest and therefore most sophisticated humor, it’s just not funny. It’s a bunch of mediocre white man problems, and though there are interesting seeds of ideas here, there just isn’t enough to hang an entire novel on. We get it. Religion is complex. Consumerism is empty. Relationships are difficult and you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone. We wouldn’t often like ourselves if we met another us. But I’ve read better versions of all those tales and less scattershot ones.
I did read some amazon reviews of the book just to see if I may have been unfair, but nope, the emperor has no clothes this time, guys. Dunno how this made the Man Booker list.