Trust Me When I Lie by Benjamin StevensonMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
So a caveat before I begin. About four months ago, I began taking a new opiate for chronic pain management. I hadn’t THOUGHT it was having any effect on my thought processes. Trying to muddle through this plot, however, has made me wonder if perhaps these drugs are more potent than I realize. It’s either that OR this is just really confusing storytelling, written without regard to chronology and lacking any real method of organization. It’s as if the author put together a series of significant events, placed each on on a separate sheet of paper, then drew them randomly from a fishbowl to determine the order in which they appeared in the book. No? Maybe it’s me. With that said, the chapters alternate between different moments in the past and present, jumping from one to the other like a hooker at a truck stop. Add to this frenetic approach the author’s tendency to be over indulgent with language, and what could have been a fine read becomes nothing more than an exercise in one’s ability to puzzle out the sequence of events and follow the chaotic musings of the main character, Jack. The worst example of this is as follows, as Jack attempts to describe his bulimia:
“He could feel the food inside him, acutely aware of where it sat. It swelled, an island, the seas of his stomach sloshing against it. But the cliff faces of that island weren’t eroding and falling into the sea, as they should have been. Instead, they were taking hold, scuttling ships and pulling more rocks into their tide. Clogging him up. He felt it. His acrobat, arms extended, wandered from shipwreck to shipwreck, mast to mast, above the jagged outcrop and vicious seas. Twirling his baton, jester’s hat wobbling, bells ringing. The sea arced beneath the acrobat, spat up, hissed.”
Seriously.
Read at your own intellectual peril.
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