The Boomer

Rating:
Summary: Stick your head in an oven after reading it
Review: A good book but you'll feel like sticking your head in an oven after reading it. I found it looking for all the books in my local library in the category "Experimental Fiction." It has a drawing on almost every page to accompany the text. It is the pessimistic story of a boomer's life from birth to death, as the protagonist struggles through life's stages in a fruitless pursuit of happiness. Its kind of cynical and reminds me of the thinking of my father's generation (survivors of the Depression and veterans of World War II). Its a small format with few pages and is a very quick read.

Rating:
Summary: A Book for All of Us
Review: Marty Asher has produced a compelling book of 101 paragraph-length chapters which chronicles the life of what we assume to be a typical man of his times - a Boomer. Each chapter is accompanied by a sort of free association illustration which could have been ripped from the pages of any popular magazine in the 1950s. The result is a compelling piece of literature that says in a few words what it has taken John Irving a lifetime to write.

The book is really about all of us, however. And how we always have been. In the end Asher's Boomer, while the details of his life are different, reminds one of Hawthorne's wayward Puritans, Sloan Wilson's "Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" and today's Microserfs. Asher pulls it off in an amazing economy of words, almost conversationally, as if someone asked, "What was your father like?"

Buy this book, read it and circulate it among your friends. You'll think about it and carry it around in your mind a few days and hopefully it will sink in.

And it IS worth buying for the pictures!

Rating:
Summary: A Melancholy Tale
Review: The Boomer is the story of the everyman, living an ordinary (if empty) American life. In 101 concise Zen-like paragraphs, punctuated with kitschy illustrations, Marty Asher forces us to think about the hardest of all questions: namely, what makes life worth living? That the author is able to accomplish this with such brevity suggests that this book is less a novel, and more a work of art, which I highly recommend.

Several other reviewers have called this book depressing; I respectfully disagree. A good story is like a mirror, and what you read into it may simply be a reflection. The moral of this story, if there is one, may be to stop and smell the roses... or, in the more poignant words of the author, to learn to love in an easy, natural way. Unlike the boomer, it's not too late for you.