The Free Fall of Webster Cummings
1 journaler for this copy...
I got this off the library sale table, so it only seems fair to pass it on again. The reviews on the back jacket make it look like someone went around at an NPR fancon to get comments: Daniel Pinkwater, Corey Flintoff, and P.J. O'Rourke all weigh in, and People magazine compares him to Garrison Keillor. I think Flintoff's last comment might be the most to the point: "It manages to be heartwarming without being too sentimental." That's pretty much exactly how I felt about the book, although I would have added "quirky" to my description.
Basic storyline summary: Over the course of about a year, a variety of unique characters find themselves drawn in improbable ways to a small town in Oregon, where they eventually discover that their lives were interconnected before they ever met. Each person is portrayed in a series of interesting and brief character sketches that eventually converge. Kindof like Six Degrees of Separation meets Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, although somewhat more fantastical in choice of plot device and with a great deal more humor. The interconnections and chance encounters could only happen in a literary setting, but they serve to highlight how often in our own lives the strange and uncanny occurs. Don't worry, the book doesn't have a sappy ending, as one would expect with so many people coming together in improbable ways.
The humor in the book is not brash and in your face, but played rather straight like Bodett seems to do in real life. At many points, I felt more like I was listening to a storyteller speaking than reading a book, although this is not to say that the narrator's voice got folksy. He has a good eye for situation, and sets up many of the events in the book more like tableaus than action, creating pictures of moods in which the actors move. Some of the scenes were of moments that change a person's life, and some of the scenes were about fairly mundane things. His descriptions are colorful and have good use of metaphor without being too pretentious about it, making even mundane situations interesting to read about.
Some characters in the book make their own decisions to change their attitudes and lives, some are forced to change by outside events, and some refuse to change regardless of how many opportunities the destiny of their literary world gives them. The snapshots we see of of these people throughout the year reminds the reader (or at least me) that changes in our lives are rarely overnight occurances, and that even if they are, it will take time for our lives to settle into their new pattern, or back into the old one. However, given the large cast of main characters, we don't get a detailed continuous analysis of this process with any individual. He skips in and out of the characters lives to highlight different points in their development, sometimes only visiting a character for five minutes of their time to show us their current mental state before moving on. He does a good job of letting us know what happened in the interim to get them to this new point, and I feel that it worked well in the context of this book. I was occasionally sad that we couldn't spend more time with some of the characters, but he kept the book from getting bogged down.
The book ends before everyone has settled into their new patterns or back into their old ones, leaving me wanting to know more about where their lives were going. I guess it's always good to wish the book weren't over. In fact, when I got to the last ten pages, I wound up setting the book aside for almost two weeks, not wanting to actually finish it, because then it would be done. The book didn't knock my socks off, but I keep coming back to moments from it, and continue to think about it. I don't want to say anything sappy like, "it makes me want to change my life", but it does make me think more concretely about my relationship with my family, and about what matters to me in my life. All without being preachy or overly sentimental. I do recommend this read. I will pick up more of his books if I stumble across them in the future, although I am not rushing out to the bookstore to find one.
Enjoy.
Basic storyline summary: Over the course of about a year, a variety of unique characters find themselves drawn in improbable ways to a small town in Oregon, where they eventually discover that their lives were interconnected before they ever met. Each person is portrayed in a series of interesting and brief character sketches that eventually converge. Kindof like Six Degrees of Separation meets Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, although somewhat more fantastical in choice of plot device and with a great deal more humor. The interconnections and chance encounters could only happen in a literary setting, but they serve to highlight how often in our own lives the strange and uncanny occurs. Don't worry, the book doesn't have a sappy ending, as one would expect with so many people coming together in improbable ways.
The humor in the book is not brash and in your face, but played rather straight like Bodett seems to do in real life. At many points, I felt more like I was listening to a storyteller speaking than reading a book, although this is not to say that the narrator's voice got folksy. He has a good eye for situation, and sets up many of the events in the book more like tableaus than action, creating pictures of moods in which the actors move. Some of the scenes were of moments that change a person's life, and some of the scenes were about fairly mundane things. His descriptions are colorful and have good use of metaphor without being too pretentious about it, making even mundane situations interesting to read about.
Some characters in the book make their own decisions to change their attitudes and lives, some are forced to change by outside events, and some refuse to change regardless of how many opportunities the destiny of their literary world gives them. The snapshots we see of of these people throughout the year reminds the reader (or at least me) that changes in our lives are rarely overnight occurances, and that even if they are, it will take time for our lives to settle into their new pattern, or back into the old one. However, given the large cast of main characters, we don't get a detailed continuous analysis of this process with any individual. He skips in and out of the characters lives to highlight different points in their development, sometimes only visiting a character for five minutes of their time to show us their current mental state before moving on. He does a good job of letting us know what happened in the interim to get them to this new point, and I feel that it worked well in the context of this book. I was occasionally sad that we couldn't spend more time with some of the characters, but he kept the book from getting bogged down.
The book ends before everyone has settled into their new patterns or back into their old ones, leaving me wanting to know more about where their lives were going. I guess it's always good to wish the book weren't over. In fact, when I got to the last ten pages, I wound up setting the book aside for almost two weeks, not wanting to actually finish it, because then it would be done. The book didn't knock my socks off, but I keep coming back to moments from it, and continue to think about it. I don't want to say anything sappy like, "it makes me want to change my life", but it does make me think more concretely about my relationship with my family, and about what matters to me in my life. All without being preachy or overly sentimental. I do recommend this read. I will pick up more of his books if I stumble across them in the future, although I am not rushing out to the bookstore to find one.
Enjoy.
