{"id":2914,"date":"2012-10-04T22:06:54","date_gmt":"2012-10-05T02:06:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/?p=2914"},"modified":"2012-10-16T22:58:18","modified_gmt":"2012-10-17T02:58:18","slug":"eleven-a-novel-by-mark-watson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/archives\/2914","title":{"rendered":"Eleven: A Novel by Mark Watson"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>
\n [rating=3] It takes a certain kind of person to laugh at the world, professionally. I have never met a truly happy, or even upbeat comedian; they’re all clowns, crying on the inside. ‘Eleven’<\/a> is definitely a book that is crying on the inside, despite its cartoony, Dilbert-esque cover. <\/p>\n

Ignore the back-cover pr\u00c3\u00a9cis that suggests you’ll be “humorously” exploring life. The plot touches on bullying, theft, obesity, stammering, halitosis, drugs, ill-temper, anger, infidelity, divorce\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 it’s a cornucopia of awkward situations and mortification of the flesh. It’s NOT funny. Or, perhaps it IS funny, since modern humour seems to have an insatiable thirst for casual cruelty. <\/p>\n

As television sitcoms devolved from ‘Seinfeld<\/a>‘s astonished disbelief at human folly to the gleeful exploitation of misery in ‘The Office<\/a>‘, ‘Arrested Development<\/a>‘ and ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm<\/a>‘; so this book takes the admixture of joys and disappointments found in ‘Love, Actually<\/a>‘ and decides that the moral of the story is NOT “love is all around”, but rather, “life’s a bitch and then you die”. <\/p>\n

I did not love this, but it was a quick, smooth read. By the end I felt respect for the author’s ambition and technical proficiency. The emotions it provoked were not uplifting; mostly dread and embarrassment on behalf of the losers and loners populating the text. Still, it drew me in, and that speaks to skilled writing. Also, it contained Scrabble, which I love. <\/p>\n

I suspect Watson is aiming at a sobering “Shakespeare’s Fool” angle: raw, caddish, exposing faults and proposing societal corrections. But who plays the fool? While Xavier doles out advice on his late-night radio talk show, he fails to embrace his own teachings, and is mocked and sorted out in turn by Pippa, who has problems of her own. <\/p>\n

The third-person omniscient narrator takes omniscience seriously, delivering random Cassandra-like prognostications about the future of various minor players. Playing God, telling us that a man on the periphery of the plot will be dead in three years, or that a child will grow up to do something special decades from now, leeched away significance from their actions in the present. The loss of sequence lead me to feel a lack of consequence, left me unable to connect to characters whose fates had already been revealed \/ sealed by the author.<\/p>\n

Tackling eleven story lines in 300 pages is also extremely ambitious; if you do the math, 11 divided by 300 works out to about 27 pages each, and actually it’s less than that, since the lion’s share focuses on Xavier. <\/p>\n

(I never grasped the “significance” of the number eleven, as the author clearly hoped I would do, according to his self-penned reading group discussion questions. It’s a number, dude, not a “concept”.)<\/p>\n

Following the threads of multiple characters with interweaving story lines is a harder sell in writing than in film. Without faces or other visual clues to help identify characters, it’s easy to get confused by the onslaught of names. I found myself flipping back and forth between chapters, struggling to keep track of “who’s who”, wishing I’d taken notes. I imagine reading this as an e-book would be a nightmare, unless you do it all in one sitting or have an exceptionally good memory.<\/p>\n

Watson complicates things by tossing multiple nationalities and locales into the mix: the book takes place in London, England but the main narrator has flashbacks to life in Australia, and meets a girl with Geordie speech patterns. My brain had trouble switching accents.<\/p>\n

I will conclude on a positive note: Mark Watson has a knack for writing good similes. He doesn’t overuse “like” or “as”, but when he provides comparisons, they are expressive and evocative. <\/p>\n

Here’s a sample about a recently cleaned flat, with a string of similes that I enjoyed:<\/p>\n

“The kitchen boasts an almost pained sheen as if it were a patient still weak from an operation: the surfaces look, superficially at least, like the untouched worktops seen on display in IKEA. The bathroom too is like a scruffy boy scrubbed up for a school photograph, grimacing sheepishly in new clothes. The overall atmosphere in the flat is healthy, glossy, but there is a sense of exhaustion, as if the inanimate objects are in a kind of shock at their treatment.” (p. 62)\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Note: DO NOT read this if you are about to do any solo babysitting for a friend’s precious infant. (Which is what I’m about to do next weekend, naturally.) <\/em><\/p>\n

3 of 5 stars \/ bookshelves: read, 320 pages, Publisher: Scribner (2010)
\nRead from September 29 to October 04, 2012<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[rating=3] It takes a certain kind of person to laugh at the world, professionally. I have never met a truly happy, or even upbeat comedian; they’re all clowns, crying on the inside. ‘Eleven’ is definitely a book that is crying on the inside, despite its cartoony, Dilbert-esque cover. Ignore the back-cover pr\u00c3\u00a9cis that suggests you’ll […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1533],"tags":[1551,1481,1546,1550,1548,224,1552,1549,1547,1545,1553,1554],"class_list":["post-2914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction-book-reviews","tag-australia","tag-awkward","tag-babysitting","tag-cleaning-lady","tag-embarrassing","tag-insomnia","tag-london","tag-neighbors","tag-night-owl","tag-radio","tag-scrabble","tag-stuttering"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2914"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2914"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2914\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2918,"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2914\/revisions\/2918"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}