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tcgarback's review
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
Critical Score: A
Personal Score: A
I really don’t want to write this review. I just want to take the notes I wrote while reading and stitch them together and be done with it. My feelings for this book are challenging and complicated and vague in the way that this novel is all of those things, and those things are its beauty. Boys of Life (despite that boring, if eventually meaningful, title) is a work of true art, the product of a real writer.
Russel delivers painfully complex emotions, characterization, and reflections on the human condition with an accessible contemporary voice. He touches on things about growing up and the experience of living and having relationships with other humans that are so very hard to put into words or realize you are experiencing in the first place. I try again and again to summarize what this book is about thematically, to even put together so much as a list of big ideas: transgressive art, art as living, sex and art, desire and aging, control and lust, apathy amidst transcendence, intelligence and class, connection…I feel like I’m losing my sense of the book the more I try to pin down what it is about.
Let me go back to the basics.
Pace. Ok, the pace is slow, in a way that I enjoyed, like watching a long movie some night under a heavy blanket when you know you can sleep in the next day.
Tone. Ok, the tone is drab, always profound, sometimes sexy. I could have used more sex scenes, but that’s neither here nor there, because this book really isn’t even about sex.
The narrator is so conflicting. He’s unlikeable for his apathy and weak character, but then again, he’s got a very strong will, and he makes bold decisions, and he isn’t dumb like he comes across to nearly everyone around him. And because this is the mind we’re inside, the book is sometimes hard to follow. It’s so interior and mystifying.
All the characters are conflicting, because they are all a bit too real, complicated to the point of being convoluted, and it becomes such a headache trying to keep up with how the relationships are evolving and how your understanding of the characters is evolving. They feel challengingly real, to a point where they start to untangle from that reality, because in real life the more you get to know someone, the less you can pin them down, because all of us contain multitudes, blah blah blah, and so basically the more you know someone, the less you know them, and this book really painted that out for me. People are more elusive the more you know them, otherwise you’re lying to yourself, or they’re lying to you, and it makes you realize how little we know ourselves, because we all have this delusion that we know who we are, but if that were true, it can only be the lie that stands in front of everything we don’t know.
I was going to take a stab at how this book deals with grooming, Stockholm syndrome, is it a problematic portrayal of a victim or is it something deeper, words and words and more words, but I actually don’t feel like getting into it more than I just did.
Russel imperfectly handles race but in a way that feels realistic for the narrator, who’s an uneducated white male baby boomer (or just about) raised in rural Kentucky. I mean, in some ways the BIPOC here are progressively portrayed, and then some lines feel harmful. Just wanted to make a note of that.
Last thing before I wrap this up. All the blurbs talk about how shocking this book is, and it’s kind of sold as this super edgy gay novel that presumably has a bunch of graphic sex and violence in it. Which should mean what? Perfect! Bring it on. I love that stuff, even if it feels like nothing fazes me anymore. But the explicit scenes in Boys of Life are very brief and minimally described. This isn’t some wild, appalling book—except in its poetics? Just not in the sex and violence department. So that could disappoint some readers; this is definitely literary fiction, not horror. But the writing is so strong and the characters so rich and the themes so evocative that I didn’t even care about the minimal sex and violence.
This is one of those books that makes me realize how my reviews tend to write around the stories, and I suspect I’ll read back on this in a few years or whenever and ne unable to gauge literally anything specific or concrete about this book from my review. I’m just talking around everything that happens. I don’t have some point to this, other than saying it.
I’ll conclude now.
I’m so used to only giving myself permission to rate a book 5 stars if it wows me in an energetic sort of way. Boys of Life is kind of sleepily brilliant. I wasn’t enthralled while reading it, and while some lines or scenes did blow me away kind of, for the most part the writing is quietly profound. It’s not a jarring prose (or story, for the most part, despite the folks who will be scandalized by one or two brief lines about scat) like Dennis Cooper or Chuck Palahniuk or Alex Kazemi. Because it’s so quiet, I kept forgetting what I’d just read. I’d come back to the book and try to recall the previous chapters, try to hold them because I knew they were so beautiful, but here I was struggling to remember beyond a basic plot summary and the emotions it left me reeling with. It’s that kind of writing, where you struggle to internalize it enough to hold onto it. No, it’s probably more of a me problem.
All to say, this is the kind of book I want to read two times to feel like I’ve truly read it one time. Its characters are that complex, its style that deceptively straight-forward.
Now I have a sense of having said a whole lot of nothing. I’m not so happy with what I’ve just pieced together. But whatever, my point is that this book is great.
Critical Score: A
Personal Score: A
I really don’t want to write this review. I just want to take the notes I wrote while reading and stitch them together and be done with it. My feelings for this book are challenging and complicated and vague in the way that this novel is all of those things, and those things are its beauty. Boys of Life (despite that boring, if eventually meaningful, title) is a work of true art, the product of a real writer.
Russel delivers painfully complex emotions, characterization, and reflections on the human condition with an accessible contemporary voice. He touches on things about growing up and the experience of living and having relationships with other humans that are so very hard to put into words or realize you are experiencing in the first place. I try again and again to summarize what this book is about thematically, to even put together so much as a list of big ideas: transgressive art, art as living, sex and art, desire and aging, control and lust, apathy amidst transcendence, intelligence and class, connection…I feel like I’m losing my sense of the book the more I try to pin down what it is about.
Let me go back to the basics.
Pace. Ok, the pace is slow, in a way that I enjoyed, like watching a long movie some night under a heavy blanket when you know you can sleep in the next day.
Tone. Ok, the tone is drab, always profound, sometimes sexy. I could have used more sex scenes, but that’s neither here nor there, because this book really isn’t even about sex.
The narrator is so conflicting. He’s unlikeable for his apathy and weak character, but then again, he’s got a very strong will, and he makes bold decisions, and he isn’t dumb like he comes across to nearly everyone around him. And because this is the mind we’re inside, the book is sometimes hard to follow. It’s so interior and mystifying.
All the characters are conflicting, because they are all a bit too real, complicated to the point of being convoluted, and it becomes such a headache trying to keep up with how the relationships are evolving and how your understanding of the characters is evolving. They feel challengingly real, to a point where they start to untangle from that reality, because in real life the more you get to know someone, the less you can pin them down, because all of us contain multitudes, blah blah blah, and so basically the more you know someone, the less you know them, and this book really painted that out for me. People are more elusive the more you know them, otherwise you’re lying to yourself, or they’re lying to you, and it makes you realize how little we know ourselves, because we all have this delusion that we know who we are, but if that were true, it can only be the lie that stands in front of everything we don’t know.
I was going to take a stab at how this book deals with grooming, Stockholm syndrome, is it a problematic portrayal of a victim or is it something deeper, words and words and more words, but I actually don’t feel like getting into it more than I just did.
Russel imperfectly handles race but in a way that feels realistic for the narrator, who’s an uneducated white male baby boomer (or just about) raised in rural Kentucky. I mean, in some ways the BIPOC here are progressively portrayed, and then some lines feel harmful. Just wanted to make a note of that.
Last thing before I wrap this up. All the blurbs talk about how shocking this book is, and it’s kind of sold as this super edgy gay novel that presumably has a bunch of graphic sex and violence in it. Which should mean what? Perfect! Bring it on. I love that stuff, even if it feels like nothing fazes me anymore. But the explicit scenes in Boys of Life are very brief and minimally described. This isn’t some wild, appalling book—except in its poetics? Just not in the sex and violence department. So that could disappoint some readers; this is definitely literary fiction, not horror. But the writing is so strong and the characters so rich and the themes so evocative that I didn’t even care about the minimal sex and violence.
This is one of those books that makes me realize how my reviews tend to write around the stories, and I suspect I’ll read back on this in a few years or whenever and ne unable to gauge literally anything specific or concrete about this book from my review. I’m just talking around everything that happens. I don’t have some point to this, other than saying it.
I’ll conclude now.
I’m so used to only giving myself permission to rate a book 5 stars if it wows me in an energetic sort of way. Boys of Life is kind of sleepily brilliant. I wasn’t enthralled while reading it, and while some lines or scenes did blow me away kind of, for the most part the writing is quietly profound. It’s not a jarring prose (or story, for the most part, despite the folks who will be scandalized by one or two brief lines about scat) like Dennis Cooper or Chuck Palahniuk or Alex Kazemi. Because it’s so quiet, I kept forgetting what I’d just read. I’d come back to the book and try to recall the previous chapters, try to hold them because I knew they were so beautiful, but here I was struggling to remember beyond a basic plot summary and the emotions it left me reeling with. It’s that kind of writing, where you struggle to internalize it enough to hold onto it. No, it’s probably more of a me problem.
All to say, this is the kind of book I want to read two times to feel like I’ve truly read it one time. Its characters are that complex, its style that deceptively straight-forward.
Now I have a sense of having said a whole lot of nothing. I’m not so happy with what I’ve just pieced together. But whatever, my point is that this book is great.
pause_theframe's review
5.0
This raw, gritty read rocked my socks. It is one of those books that makes no apologies for the story it tells one the brutal honesty it conveys. I love that about it. It meant that, though the entire book, I was constantly battling with different emotions, as I connected with what was taking place.
The characters, in the book, were a wide variety of people. From the main character, who starts off as a sheltered, quiet teen, to the flirtatious and convincing director. I liked that it gave us the opportunity to experience all types of people, get to know their ways of thinking and what made them have such differing personalities. I also liked that we were given many opportunities to see into their minds, and try to understand what they were doing or thinking.
The pace of the book was good. It felt very lifelike and had a fast enough pace, in the moments where the lead character was struggling, to really give us a feel for the fear, angst and worry that he felt.
This book was such a great story. It is unique and written very well, which made it very easy to dive right in and want to keep ready. I just had to know what was going to happen to the main. Though the subject matter is rough, maybe even offensive to some, it is real and not afraid to show people the side of the world they wouldn't even want to dream about. All of this, without ever apologizing for its honesty and ability to grow you into that moment head first. I love it.
The characters, in the book, were a wide variety of people. From the main character, who starts off as a sheltered, quiet teen, to the flirtatious and convincing director. I liked that it gave us the opportunity to experience all types of people, get to know their ways of thinking and what made them have such differing personalities. I also liked that we were given many opportunities to see into their minds, and try to understand what they were doing or thinking.
The pace of the book was good. It felt very lifelike and had a fast enough pace, in the moments where the lead character was struggling, to really give us a feel for the fear, angst and worry that he felt.
This book was such a great story. It is unique and written very well, which made it very easy to dive right in and want to keep ready. I just had to know what was going to happen to the main. Though the subject matter is rough, maybe even offensive to some, it is real and not afraid to show people the side of the world they wouldn't even want to dream about. All of this, without ever apologizing for its honesty and ability to grow you into that moment head first. I love it.
michaeldmcclain's review against another edition
3.0
BOYS OF LIFE is enjoyable as far as pulpy gay erotica goes but its ambivalent protagonist and slow-moving plot make it a slog to get through when we're not in the midst of a sex scene.
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