Don’t let the ridiculous title (or the appalling cover) fool you; this book is more Catch 22 than The Bathroom Reader. In fact, it’s so much like Catch 22 that the protagonist may as well have been named Yossarian rather than Doyle Coldiron (it’s no coincidence that there is a plug from Heller on the front cover). Doyle is a US Secret Service agent who suffers from depression and loneliness that result, in part anyway, from the secrecy surrounding his job. Where the book differs most from Catch 22 is not in the specific characters and situations (I mean, they are different, of course, but that has little impact thematically), and not in the prose style (which is incredibly simple and straightforward and logical to the point of absurdity), but rather in the fact that the sense of insanity and futility comes, not from a ridiculous and high-stress situation, but rather from the malaise of living in the modern, every-day world, and trying to make a human connection in that world. It’s not difficult to see why Doyle is chronically and clinically depressed. He’s in love with a married woman, unable to talk about his job, dealing with the near pointlessness of his job most of the time, surrounded almost exclusively by people who are in the same absurd situation, but many of whom (I’m thinking of the politicians, here) seem to think themselves far more important that all other people—and he’s aware of how ridiculous and hopeless a situation this is. One gets the sense that if all of us were aware of just how much like life this book truly is, we would all be as depressed and self-hating as Doyle. Welter’s humour can of often be a little obvious, but without it this book would be a depressing slash-your-wrists-after-reading-it slog, but instead it’s light and quick. I generally have a ban during April and May (for deeply personal reasons I cannot share) on books known to be depressing, and had I known how low this book can get, I would have held off reading it. But that doesn’t mean you should.
Next is The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work, edited by Marie Arana (a collection of essays from The Washington Post Book World).
