#50.  The Session.  Aaron Petrovich.  Fiction Novella.  2.5 Stars

I’m too stupid to read this book.  It’s partly my fault, and I partly blame the back cover. 

The reality is that the book is written in a kind of stage play type style like Beckett’s Waiting For Godot (although there are no character names followed by a colon, so you have to pay even closer attention to know who is speaking).  I have read and enjoyed Godot, but can’t claim to be a super-fan.  It’s just not accessible enough to me.  I cannot connect to the characters and, for me, that is always the most important thing when I’m reading.  That is obviously not Beckett’s goal in Godot and that’s not Petrovich’s goal in Session, but in the case of Session, I was seriously lead astray by the back cover (which is why I usually do not read them and will now go back to my promise to never read them again).  Here’s what the back cover says,

“Funny, frantic, and with a subversive intelligence, Aaron Petrovich’s Keaton-esque heroes, Detectives Smith and Smith, stumble upon a bizarre new religion while following the trail of a murdered mathematician’s missing organs.  Their investigation to discover the truth – about the mathematician, the men and women who may have eaten him, and ultimately the nature of truth, sanity, and identity – leads them into a lunatic asylum they may never leave”. 

AWESOME right?  Yeah, no.  I got maybe a tenth of that from reading the book.  Really, I’m lucky if I got a tenth of that.  If I had not read the back cover I would have had no idea that was what this was supposed to be about.  This book was almost entirely inaccessible to me.  I could connect to nothing and I could follow little.  I was expecting a narrative of some sort due to the back cover and found no narrative at all. 

I agree with part of the back cover, as below the synopsis is says that “Petrovich elevates rapid fire banter to a hysterical musical litany that carries the detectives, and the reader, right along with it”.  The writing was kind of brilliant, and I did feel compelled forward, driven by the two characters dialogue with eachother.  It was fascinating, and if I was smarter perhaps I would have gotten the point as well, but I’m afraid in the end I’m just not smart enough for it. 

I’m giving it 2.5 stars because I suspect it is quite brilliant, and there is no doubt it is compelling and well written, and I can’t penalize it too heavily just because I’m not intelligent enough to “get it”.  So I’m going to give it 2.5 stars for now, and plan to re-read it someday, preferable when I’ve become a more intelligent and enlightened being (that’s for sure gonna happen right?).

2.5  stars.