I was asked to read this book for a lit mag and do a review of it. The last several books I’ve done for them have been pretty awesome, so I was optimistic going into this one. It’s a picaresque style novel, which I’ve never encountered before, and I had high hopes that I would enjoy this new type of genre. But, alas, I’ve DNFed this one at page 256 because I just can’t anymore with the crazitude.
Remedia starts out like it’s going to be interesting, with a 1st person narrator (who’s name I truly don’t remember….maybe he’s never named?), who can see doors everywhere. They’re not real doors, but abstract openings in the universe that skew his reality and make him wonder about the nature of the world. They also make him interested in photography since the lens of the camera mimics the way he sees the doors of the universe. It’s a neat concept, and one I was totally willing to go on board with, but as the novel picks up speed, a level of wackiness arises that I just couldn’t stay with.
In the original picaresque style, the hero is supposed to live off his own wits, but our narrator just seems to pick up girlfriends and wander around letting them take care of him until they decide to leave. His first girlfriend is an actor in a traveling troop that takes him along for the ride to France. After she decides he’s cramping her art and dumps him, he goes to Ireland and meets a clothing designer who’s friends with a photographer, and our hero becomes an apprentice. Things seem to be going pretty well until Clothing Designer decides her clothes aren’t appreciated in Ireland, and she wants to go to the U.S. So they do, and end up in a flophouse in California. On the way, they break down on Rt. 66 and stay in a teepee with a Native American named Takoa, and his wife. In the tent, they do some weed and other drugs, things happen, and our hero starts seeing doors in the desert.
Fast-forward a few chapters and suddenly our hero finds himself in Ohio in the care of an Amish family. He has no idea how he got there, and the only thing he can remember is doing some Peyote with some friends in California. His buddy Takoa drives out to pick him up. But while there, our hero learns that the younger son of the family is breaking all Amish laws by coding computers in his daddy’s barn. Somehow this discovery leads to the father following our hero and Takoa on a journey through the desert to visit his first wife’s grave (I don’t know why, it’s never really clear). Afterwards they go to some convent in the desert where both our hero’s girlfriends and Takoa’s wife have set up some sort of convent.
I DNFed when we got to the part where the Amish father is looking for some sort of absolution from the women in the convent-that’s-not-really-a-convent somewhere in the middle of the Arizona desert. It just got silly, and all the pieces of the world sort of fell apart for me.
In the end, this book just comes off as a man-child taking drugs and wandering his way through life waiting for women to take care of him. The doors in the air don’t really matter, the camera motif falls away, and he just naval-gazes his way from one place to the other. While the structure of the narrative does stay true to the picaresque style of plot-less interconnected adventures, they just totally go off the rails and I have no idea what I’m supposed to take away from it.
1 star for decent, poetic language.
-4 stars for man-child main character.