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charlie_pearson's review
funny
lighthearted
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.5
jenni8fer's review against another edition
4.0
Experimental fiction arranged as a collection of short, overheard pieces of conversations in five sections, the first being The Absent Therapist. All of these are absolutely brilliant. There are some very funny ones as well.
thebobsphere's review
3.0
The Absent Therapist is my second Will Eaves novel and like his previous book, Murmur, It’s a bundle of mixed feelings.
On one hand I think he’s a fantastic writer. I mean there’s a lot of pleasure in reading every line he writes. TAT’s structure is a series of paragraphs so the reader is getting bite sized chunks of Eaves’ prose. In theory this means that this bit and pieces should stick in your mind.
However that’s the problem I found with this book. Nothing stuck except the paragraph about boxer shorts – which made me laugh loudly on a bus. Other than that I doubt if I could recall any other part of The Absent Therapist.
That’s all I can say about it really. If you want a memorable book read in fragments then check out Brenda Lozano’s Loop. I fared much better with that.
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On one hand I think he’s a fantastic writer. I mean there’s a lot of pleasure in reading every line he writes. TAT’s structure is a series of paragraphs so the reader is getting bite sized chunks of Eaves’ prose. In theory this means that this bit and pieces should stick in your mind.
However that’s the problem I found with this book. Nothing stuck except the paragraph about boxer shorts – which made me laugh loudly on a bus. Other than that I doubt if I could recall any other part of The Absent Therapist.
That’s all I can say about it really. If you want a memorable book read in fragments then check out Brenda Lozano’s Loop. I fared much better with that.
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catdad77a45's review
2.0
Impelled to read this as I am (slowly) making my way through all of the Goldsmith Prize nominees/winners, and because of the somewhat intriguing précis, I might have liked it better and rated it higher if I had not recently read Joy Williams' '99 Stories of God', which is virtually the same book. That is, it is composed of about 200 (more or less) vignettes of exactly one paragraph in length, with no through line, no continuing characters (although several names are repeated a few times - Linda, Clive, Darryl - and God help us - Haneke; although it is never clear if these are MEANT to be the same people from segment to segment because none of the characters are ever delineated by more than one rudimentary characteristic/emotion) - and very little discernible POINT!
One reviewer stated that the stories 'arrangement is precise', but I hazard to say the book would be no different if the 200 fragments were put into a hat and drawn out in any random order. It is like making a meal of 200 amuse-bouches with never an entrée, salad or dessert (or needful copious glasses of wine) to disrupt the monotony.
Here is what I wrote in my review of the Williams book and it serves as well for this: "About a third of these VERY short 'stories' ... are clever in a drolly dry way, a third of them are 'meh', and the final third are well nigh incomprehensible (I found myself wondering 'What's the point?' a LOT)". A week from now I could reread this and have no recollection of any of it.
One reviewer stated that the stories 'arrangement is precise', but I hazard to say the book would be no different if the 200 fragments were put into a hat and drawn out in any random order. It is like making a meal of 200 amuse-bouches with never an entrée, salad or dessert (or needful copious glasses of wine) to disrupt the monotony.
Here is what I wrote in my review of the Williams book and it serves as well for this: "About a third of these VERY short 'stories' ... are clever in a drolly dry way, a third of them are 'meh', and the final third are well nigh incomprehensible (I found myself wondering 'What's the point?' a LOT)". A week from now I could reread this and have no recollection of any of it.
arirang's review
4.0
"Thinking while I'm thinking this that Owen is very troubled, when he stared right at me and I realised he didn't have anyone to talk to. And maybe not much sense of what he'd said. Or: he needed to be contradicted in some way, as if what he was saying was "Tell me what's wrong with what I've said. Talk to me." ... So I excused myself and went to the toilet. While I was there, it occurred to me that Owen had been addressing an ideal person, a sort of absent therapist, and I felt sorry for him. Sorry for me, too, later. The toilet was awash. My trainers got soaked and no one would sit next to me on the night bus, which stopped for ages outside the British Interplanetary Association in Vauxhall. Where do they go for their day trips? That's what I'd like to know."
The Absent Therapist was on the, very strong, shortlist for the 2014 Goldsmith's Prize which "rewards fiction that breaks the mould or opens up new possibilities for the novel form...and is thus awarded to a book that is deemed genuinely novel and which embodies the spirit of invention that characterises the genre at its best." It is the fifth of the 6 shortlisted books I have read, the previous 4 all being strong https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1055366156 , https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1055365823 , https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1130709496 and
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1297645333
and Eaves book deserves its place alongside them.
I say "book" because The Absent Therapist stretches the novel form close to breaking point - indeed arguably it qualifies as a novel purely because the author tells us that was his intention.
The novel takes the form of a large number of individual pieces, some as short as one line, none longer than a page or so, and all in the form of a first person monologue.
There's a lot of absurd humour - the "interplanetary society" above, and one of my favourite pieces.
"You know you're among the remnants of the aristocracy when you accept an invitation to Sunday lunch in Deal and find yourself talking to a florid character who eats with his mouth open and who, when you turn your ankle on his steps, produces from his 'cold store' a compress made of frozen squirrel."
but also some powerful observations that make the reader think - this managed to make me have second thoughts more than thirty years after my own school days:
"Darren may well be right, Mrs Woollaston but the other lads are right too. It's all very well saying "football doesn't matter. It doesn't matter who wins" and as it happens I agree with him. The trouble is, he knows he's cleverer than them and they know he knows it. And it doesn't work the other way round does it. They don't have the option of saying 'maths doesn't matter'. Or rather they feel they do, when they see someone like Darren dismissing something they care about like football. It makes them feel they don't have to give a hoot about the things they're no good at, and that approach is what I'm wasting my life fighting."
What Eaves also doesn't attempt (or if he attempts doesn't achieve) is to give the different voices a distinct tone or language, except occasionally (a plumber tells his customer "They used the free mil frough the top floor and the half inch downstairs. That's why you got clanking."), the difference is instead the perspective, content and implied situation.
There are some themes that reoccur - the meaning of autonomous machines ("the question of whether or not a machine can write a sonnet or symphony is not the interesting question. The interesting question is: by whom should such a sonnet or symphony be judged, and how...we have to wean ourselves of the idea of estimating machine function as a kind of graded performance, with 'most human like' as the prize-winning category"), sex, mostly kinky (another wonderful piece starts "I went to the Spanking Club once..."), and some, but relatively few, of the voices reoccur.
But it would, I think, be wrong to examine the book too closely for links between the pieces - the reader would be better advised to simply let the difference voices flow over them. Indeed I would take issue with one of the reviews quoted on the novel's flap-jacket that proclaims "Every comma is vital for the flow to run as it does...their arrangement is precise down to the last dropped aitch" - in reality I think one could easily read the pieces in a different order or skip some entirely and the book would still work.
However, one feature in common is that the pieces are all one-sided - some are monologues to an imagined or absent interlocutor, in others we are getting one side of a conversations, some are reported/rehearsed speech "that's what I tell Darryl but he doesn't listen", "I don't have anyone to tell that to", or imagined, hypothetical conversations "the argument would have had a different tenor - a completely different meaning, in fact - if Rachel and I had been lovers, rather than friends. Or brother and sister. Or the frazzled parents of a child who has rung home, asking to be picked up." The common, theme if there is one, is the need for the voices to be heard, and need for the Absent Therapist of the title piece.
Overall, a very worthwhile attempt and a different approach to the novel. There are shades of the micro-fiction of Lydia Davis and the polyphonic voices of Pessoa's Book of Disquiet - but Eaves carves out his own distinctive approach.
The Absent Therapist was on the, very strong, shortlist for the 2014 Goldsmith's Prize which "rewards fiction that breaks the mould or opens up new possibilities for the novel form...and is thus awarded to a book that is deemed genuinely novel and which embodies the spirit of invention that characterises the genre at its best." It is the fifth of the 6 shortlisted books I have read, the previous 4 all being strong https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1055366156 , https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1055365823 , https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1130709496 and
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1297645333
and Eaves book deserves its place alongside them.
I say "book" because The Absent Therapist stretches the novel form close to breaking point - indeed arguably it qualifies as a novel purely because the author tells us that was his intention.
The novel takes the form of a large number of individual pieces, some as short as one line, none longer than a page or so, and all in the form of a first person monologue.
There's a lot of absurd humour - the "interplanetary society" above, and one of my favourite pieces.
"You know you're among the remnants of the aristocracy when you accept an invitation to Sunday lunch in Deal and find yourself talking to a florid character who eats with his mouth open and who, when you turn your ankle on his steps, produces from his 'cold store' a compress made of frozen squirrel."
but also some powerful observations that make the reader think - this managed to make me have second thoughts more than thirty years after my own school days:
"Darren may well be right, Mrs Woollaston but the other lads are right too. It's all very well saying "football doesn't matter. It doesn't matter who wins" and as it happens I agree with him. The trouble is, he knows he's cleverer than them and they know he knows it. And it doesn't work the other way round does it. They don't have the option of saying 'maths doesn't matter'. Or rather they feel they do, when they see someone like Darren dismissing something they care about like football. It makes them feel they don't have to give a hoot about the things they're no good at, and that approach is what I'm wasting my life fighting."
What Eaves also doesn't attempt (or if he attempts doesn't achieve) is to give the different voices a distinct tone or language, except occasionally (a plumber tells his customer "They used the free mil frough the top floor and the half inch downstairs. That's why you got clanking."), the difference is instead the perspective, content and implied situation.
There are some themes that reoccur - the meaning of autonomous machines ("the question of whether or not a machine can write a sonnet or symphony is not the interesting question. The interesting question is: by whom should such a sonnet or symphony be judged, and how...we have to wean ourselves of the idea of estimating machine function as a kind of graded performance, with 'most human like' as the prize-winning category"), sex, mostly kinky (another wonderful piece starts "I went to the Spanking Club once..."), and some, but relatively few, of the voices reoccur.
But it would, I think, be wrong to examine the book too closely for links between the pieces - the reader would be better advised to simply let the difference voices flow over them. Indeed I would take issue with one of the reviews quoted on the novel's flap-jacket that proclaims "Every comma is vital for the flow to run as it does...their arrangement is precise down to the last dropped aitch" - in reality I think one could easily read the pieces in a different order or skip some entirely and the book would still work.
However, one feature in common is that the pieces are all one-sided - some are monologues to an imagined or absent interlocutor, in others we are getting one side of a conversations, some are reported/rehearsed speech "that's what I tell Darryl but he doesn't listen", "I don't have anyone to tell that to", or imagined, hypothetical conversations "the argument would have had a different tenor - a completely different meaning, in fact - if Rachel and I had been lovers, rather than friends. Or brother and sister. Or the frazzled parents of a child who has rung home, asking to be picked up." The common, theme if there is one, is the need for the voices to be heard, and need for the Absent Therapist of the title piece.
Overall, a very worthwhile attempt and a different approach to the novel. There are shades of the micro-fiction of Lydia Davis and the polyphonic voices of Pessoa's Book of Disquiet - but Eaves carves out his own distinctive approach.
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