Kim Miller
If this is SF it's on the very soft end of the genre. It's more the probing of one man's mind as he probes the minds of others.
David can read people's minds. It's something he discovered in child hood and quickly learned to keep it secret. He grows up relating to others more by what he sees in their thinking than what they present on the surface, something that make other people think he's a bit strange, or possibly threatening.
in middle age he finds the ability falling from him, and it's like he's cast adrift into the ebb and flow of normal human interraction and he's about to drown. The narrative is not as important in this book as the metaphor of the aging man, losing whatever it is that has defined his view of himself.
Having said that, the story of his life is engaging. The prose is constantly smooth and draws the reader into itself. His life of reading the minds of women to find easy sex partners, his job as a stock broker reading the minds of the successful traders, and his fall into ghost writing term papers for university students, they are all woven into a web of comfort. The book jumps between various moments in his life and there is an outside narrator who appears at times. This might disrupt the flow of the story but Silverberg keeps it unified. It's as if he's building something with Lego bricks and adding in pieces at will rather that starting from the bottom and working upwards. The unified whole is very satisfying.
Two other authors came to mind while reading this. Gary Shteyngart in 'Little Failure' and Philip Roth in 'Portnoy's Complaint'. There seems to be a trope of the 'New York Jew' in authorship and protagonist. Coming from the other side of the world I don't know i'm reading too much into this.
The book closes with David coming to grips with what it's like being a normal human. He doesn't handle it well. However, his young nephew has dropped his cautious view of David and is suddenly talking to him like a family member. 'Welcome to the new you, you loser', says the universe to David.
If this is SF it's on the very soft end of the genre. It's more the probing of one man's mind as he probes the minds of others.
David can read people's minds. It's something he discovered in child hood and quickly learned to keep it secret. He grows up relating to others more by what he sees in their thinking than what they present on the surface, something that make other people think he's a bit strange, or possibly threatening.
in middle age he finds the ability falling from him, and it's like he's cast adrift into the ebb and flow of normal human interraction and he's about to drown. The narrative is not as important in this book as the metaphor of the aging man, losing whatever it is that has defined his view of himself.
Having said that, the story of his life is engaging. The prose is constantly smooth and draws the reader into itself. His life of reading the minds of women to find easy sex partners, his job as a stock broker reading the minds of the successful traders, and his fall into ghost writing term papers for university students, they are all woven into a web of comfort. The book jumps between various moments in his life and there is an outside narrator who appears at times. This might disrupt the flow of the story but Silverberg keeps it unified. It's as if he's building something with Lego bricks and adding in pieces at will rather that starting from the bottom and working upwards. The unified whole is very satisfying.
Two other authors came to mind while reading this. Gary Shteyngart in 'Little Failure' and Philip Roth in 'Portnoy's Complaint'. There seems to be a trope of the 'New York Jew' in authorship and protagonist. Coming from the other side of the world I don't know i'm reading too much into this.
The book closes with David coming to grips with what it's like being a normal human. He doesn't handle it well. However, his young nephew has dropped his cautious view of David and is suddenly talking to him like a family member. 'Welcome to the new you, you loser', says the universe to David.