If Paul O’Rourke had
simply gone to Henry Louis Gates, Jr, he could have saved me 335 pp of
confusion & good writing, and then Joshua Ferris and I could both be able TO RISE AGAIN AT A DECENT HOUR. [Little,
Brown, & Co, 2014]
O’Rourke is a young and highly
successful Manhattan dentist and, despite of and because of his NYC presence, a
die-hard Red Sox fan. He desperately wants an identity beyond dentistry, a
sense of who he is rather than what he does. It is a restless search that keeps
him up nights, hence the title of the book.
He tries to find identity
in a succession of women, each of whom is attractive to him because of her
family, a place where there are roots, where there is identity. He wants each
one more for her family identity than for herself, and thus always loses both.
Someone impersonates him
online, and claims that he is actually an Ulm, part of a small clan that
originated in the Holy Land. It is both attractive and disturbing, a real and
exotic and unique identity, but his own individual identity had been
pre-empted. People think it is he who is posting online, including some vaguely
anti-Semitic ramblings, even though he once tried to be Jewish to get a girl.
Ferris never seems to be
able to figure out which direction he wants to go, the best way to explore
identity. The book is a mishmash of themes: family, women, whether to have
children, religion, ethnicity, identity theft in the cyber age, etc. Maybe that
is his theme; that there is no theme. Finally he just sort of gives up and has
O’Rourke becomes a Cubs fan, which in the baseball world is both total identity
and total frustration.
It’s good writing, but I’m
glad it’s over so that I can, indeed, rise again at a decent hour.
John
Robert McFarland
One
of the great things about having more clothes and gadgets and sports equipment
and tools than one could ever need or use up is that the only gifts left are
books. So almost all my reading is from gift books from my wife, and our
daughters, Mary Beth Connolly and Kathleen “Katie” Kennedy. Katie’s Learning to Swear in America will be
published by J. K. Rowling’s publisher, Bloomsbury Press, in 2016.
My
novel, VETS, will be published by Black Opal Books in late 2014 or early 2015.
In case you missed it, a
Tweet Repeat: “A
person should live their own life.” In this age, the singular “their” makes
good sense, but it clanks so badly when I hear it I just can’t use it.
I tweet as yooper1721.
I also write, once in a
great while, Christ in Winter: Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for
the Years of Winter. http://christinwinter.blogspot.com/
MY OTHER BOOKS:
NOW THAT I HAVE CANCER I AM WHOLE: Reflections on Life
and Healing for Cancer Patients and Those Who Love Them [AndrewsMcMeel & HarperAudio, with Czech and
Japanese translations] Paul K. Hamilton, MD, the co-founder of CanSurmount,
called it “The best book for cancer patients, by a cancer patient, ever.”
AN ORDINARY MAN
[HarperPaperbacks] Randall MacLane just wanted to be an ordinary man. But sent
with a message for Custer, he became a drifting lawman with a knack for
killing, and a deep well of loneliness. Then a twist of fate brought him full
circle…
THE STRANGE CALLING: Stories of Ministry [Smyth&Helwys] I didn’t want to be a preacher,
but I made a deal with God to save my sister’s life. Was that really a “call,”
though? I said, “I’ll try t for 50 years, and if I still don’t know, I’ll do
something else.” These are stories of what happened in those years of
questioning the call.
WHEN FATHER RODE THE MAIL and Other Stories of
Christmas [lulu.com] ISBN
978-1-300-38566-0
If you like baseball
poetry, take a look at “Frosty & the Babe” http://www.baseball-almanac.com/poetry/frosty_and_the_babe.shtml
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