It has been a little whole since I have read a book that I did not think was good. Since I’ve retooled my reading habits (cutting my reading quotient by about half), it has given room for certain books to breath instead trying to race through them to meet a certain goal by the end of a calendar. That doesn’t mean all of them have been home runs since I’ve passed book 1,001, but at least I found the act of reading them to be a joyous an enlightening experience. But with last year’s novel Trenton Makes, the debut of author Tadzio Koelb, more times than not I found it to be a grating, obtuse and frustrating experience to get through, with it’s fluffy sentences and rather interesting premise not shielding it from poor plotting and sloppy jumps between time periods. It’s premise is what sold me, focusing on an unnamed woman whose been beaten down by factory work while all the men were fighting in WWII who one day kills her husband, a man named Abe Kunstler after a domestic dispute and takes on his identity. It offers a few clever scenes explaining how she can pull this off, with many of the ancillary characters such as co-workers and bar patrons, commenting on his/her small stature and one scene with Inez, his/her eventual wife describing his lack of male genitalia as a result of a war time injury, which then leads to the scene where Inez and Abe trick a drunk young man into sex with her, a disturbing and blackly comic scene that is the highlight of the book. But it’s plot I felt was always kept at arm’s length, shaded by purple prose that is fun to read but offers very little, even in the second half where the product of Inez and Abe’s orchestrated rape, a sensitive young man named Art tries to help a friend dodge the Vietnam War draft. A shoddy dissection of masculinity that lacks a punch, I really wished I liked this novel more than I do.
Rating: 2/5
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