So bad it made me make up a bad metaphor

So I thought this was going to be Craig Ferguson’s biography.  I know it says “a novel” but I still thought it was semi-biographical at least. I was wrong, it appears.

This is not good.  It bounces around and rambles.  Everyone seems to have miserable lives.  Some of the background characters have interesting stories, but as others have mentioned, women are not portrayed well.  I didn’t hate it as much as other people, but I didn’t like it either.

 

We follow certain people around, the brothers Saul and Leon, George, and Fraser.  George seems to be the most decent of the lot, and he’s lived a normal disappointing life.  Fraser went from being a shitty kid to a sleazy actor televangelist. Saul and Leon went from being shitty kids to shitty adults who are scamming people somehow, I think, also with religion.  Saul appears to be the worst. He deliberately sabatoges his brother away from a possibly decent path in life because he wants his brother all to himself. And as you’re going through the story, you know that Saul makes it, although he seems to get what’s coming to him.  And Fraser does too, although you don’t know that from as early on.

I made it through a little less than half, and then I skipped to the end chapters.  And in skipping over half the book, it doesn’t appear that I missed much. How Fraser got to where he was was probably most of that, but it’s easy to guess a little if not most of what happened.  And I don’t really care enough to wade through to find out.

 

I did like how he explains a theory on how certain relationships work.  If you didn’t make it that far, basically he says that since the atoms on earth get rearranged in many ways, that people who have a successful connection have atoms from the same past item.  In this case, it is from porridge eaten by Alexander the Great. It’s a very sweet thought. And there are little snippets throughout that are lovely, but they are sprinkles on a sundae made of bland mashed potatoes.  Nice on their own, great on the right thing, but they don’t make up for the unappetizingness of the whole.

I own this book now, unfortunately.

This fulfills the CBR10 Bingo square of “#CannonBookClub”