| Title | : | Castle |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1555975224 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781555975227 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 229 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 2002 |
In the late winter of 2006, I returned to my home town and bought 612 acres of land on the far western edge of the county." So begins, innocuously enough, J. Robert Lennon's gripping, spooky, and brilliant new novel. Unforthcoming, formal, and more than a little defensive in his encounters with curious locals, Eric Loesch starts renovating a run-down house in the small, upstate New York town of his childhood. When he inspects the title to the property, however, he discovers a chunk of land in the middle of his woods that he does not own. What's more, the name of the owner is blacked out.
Loesch sets out to explore the forbidding and almost impenetrable forest—lifeless, it seems, but for a bewitching white deer—that is the site of an eighteenth-century Indian massacre. But this peculiar adventure story has much to do with America's current military misadventures—and Loesch's secrets come to mirror the American psyche in a paranoid age. The answer to what—and who—might lie at the heart of Loesch's property stands at the center of this daring and riveting novel from the author whose writing, according to Ann Patchett, "contains enough electricity to light up the country.""
Castle Reviews
-
The story in this book was interesting, fairly entertaining, and had the potential to be explosive, but instead it merely fizzled along with just enough action to keep me reading. And although I don't mind unhappy or unclean endings, the ending to this book was unsatisfying, rushed, and lame.
The writing in the early stages of the story felt compressed and clumsy. The main character spends the first half of the book wondering why he's doing the things he's doing even though he's fully aware of his past and his motivations in the second half of the book. Other mysteries in the first half of the book aren't mysterious at all in the second half, again without the benefit of adequate connective tissue. I'm not sure why so many leaps occur in the narrative. Perhaps the publisher (one that I have never heard of before) was cheaping out on page counts and editing staff? I don't know.
Overall, this book was lightly entertaining but frustrating and ultimately unsatisfying.
Ouch? -
First 10 pages of this book are okay .. and then the next first 150 are amazing. The book works on withheld mysteries which can often feel like a kind of trick, but the absence of any clue to the narrator's story becomes creepy, vivid, and mind bending. The book degrades significantly when these mysteries are revealed. The writing uses the narrator's stuffy self-conscience to both ironic and oddly self-revealing ends, but once things are shown the story becomes a knowable trope. The book's connection to Vietnam and Iraq feel even more remote and unconvincing despite the compelling detail. I wonder if this is the problem of all puzzles, rebus, and stories that are essentially puzzle pieces being put together as a narrative? Twin Peaks had this same issue. As soon as Bob was explained, the show lost its compelling inner workings. As Lost winds up its seasons long narrative it becomes less and less compelling. I wondered in reading the last half of the book how satisfying it would be read a book where the withheld mystery was never actually revealed? (Five stars because I ended up reading this book in 2 sittings, and was on the edge of my seat in utter lit angst the firs time.)
-
Well-written psychological novel with an unreliable narrator.
-
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
It's always such a crushing disappointment to see a novel start great and then peter out by the end, like is precisely the case with J. Robert Lennon's latest, Castle; because I gotta admit, the first two-thirds of this deeply unsettling book is one of the best spooky stories I've ever read, which like the best of Victorian "Weird" fiction achieves its creeps in a deceptively subtle way, the slow-moving story of an unusually judgmental older man and disgraced career soldier who has recently decided to move back to his despised small hometown in upstate New York for unexplained reasons. As the first half of this book continues, then, and the man slowly gets settled isolationist-style in the large tract of supposedly haunted woods he has recently purchased, a series of ever-increasingly bizarre mysteries start quietly unfolding in front of our eyes, including why he's so self-righteous, why he got kicked out of the military, why the town's residents are always giving him random cold shoulders, why he moved back in the first place, and most importantly, what exact supernatural mystery lies in the square parcel of land in the middle of his property that the previous owner refuses to sell, an owner who has had his name excised from all corresponding legal documents, and who for some reason has built a McMansion-sized medieval castle on said parcel, locked airtight and with properties that seem to defy several laws of physics.
Ah, but then we get to the last third, where everything suddenly starts falling apart -- because although I won't be revealing any spoilers today, I will go so far as to say that the book turns out to have no actual supernatural elements at all, and that the grounded-in-reality, "ripped from the headlines" explanation Lennon comes up with for everything is both ho-hum and overly incredulous, an ending that made me both yawn and angrily yell, "Really, Lennon? Really?" (And as long as we're on the subject of unreasonable leaps in logic -- although I happily accept repressed memories as a legitimate storytelling device, to have a character completely block out every single detail of an entire half-decade of his life, a period that he claims later is the most important formative period of his entire youth, simply smacks of lazy structuring on the part of the author, a flat excuse for adding a hackneyed ending which could've been done a whole lot better.) Also, despite the following being almost a spoiler, you deserve to know that the last third of the book features dozens of explicit scenes of a child being psychologically and physically tortured; and as someone who now has kids as a regular part of his own life, I've discovered that such scenes are so upsetting to me as to be nearly unreadable, a situation I suppose is the case for many parents out there, which is why I consider it fair that you know about it long before you decide to even pick the book up in the first place. Castle is getting as high a score today as it is because of the first half being so great, but make no mistake over its second half dropping precipitously in quality; and while it does get a tepid recommendation today overall, it also comes with a strong warning for the buyer to beware.
Out of 10: 7.1 -
This took me forever to read because of the narrator, who rambles on endlessly about everything. The gist of the story here is that Eric Loesch returns to his hometown of Gerrysburg, New York after years away because of a widely publicized bad career move. He buys a house and some land out in the middle of nowhere and then discovers that he doesn't own a portion of land in the middle of the woods. Even weirder is that the owner's name is blacked out on the papers he has received.
Once Eric begins his investigation into who owns the land, apparently repressed memories begin to come back to him from his childhood--and these are not good memories. And finally, almost at the very end of the book does the reader find out Eric's story and what happened that drove him home.
This was a book that is a very slow read and was supposed to be a novel of paranoia and a thriller. Paranoia, I just didn't get and it definitely wasn't a thriller because it moved too slow for me and was at times quite boring. It often brought on a fit of narcolepsy whenever I tried to read it. I finished it thinking that there had to be some redeeming quality since it was a bookmarks pick but by the end I was just fed up. -
Of all the books I've read that have been described as "Kafka-esque," this one definitely is, or at least starts out like it. Straightforward, journalistic, about an alienated narrator who goes back and forth between being hurt and offended by the people around him and hurting and offending them. Then it goes more regressive-squishy, with a digression at the end about torture in the military that I think definitely weakens the book overall. In sum, though, I thought the book was very interesting.
Oh, and also - the author used a lot of obvious foreshadowing, which I never like.
I left the store feeling much more safe and secure, even though I didn't have the Browning yet. It was the feel of it in my hand; in spite of its flaws, or perhaps because of them, it filled me with confidence. I thought of my father's Enfield then, and wondered if it had made him feel the same way. Of course, in reality, the gun did not make him safer--on the contrary, it was the instrument of his death. But I was not my father.
...and I *just* got the obvious Kafka comparison with the title. Wow. -
I picked up this book based on a favorable NPR recommendation. I have to say that at first I found the story very gripping; to be more specific, I felt uneasy and often downright terrified. There is some excellent suspense in this book, and plenty of mystery to pull you along.
That said, I found the mystery's resolution to be implausible, cloudy, and generally disappointing. The ending ruins the rest of the book. -
Castle is a psychological thriller with a slow reveal that in style and atmosphere reminds me a lot of Iain Bank’s early fiction; e.g. The Wasp Factory, The Bridge and Walking on Glass. Like The Wasp Factory, Castle is peopled with unlikeable characters doing appalling things.
It is a step down from Banks, particularly evident in the choppy reveal of the connection between the title character Loesch and Dr. Stiles.
I also did not like Lennon’s use of the as the impetus for Loesch’s return to his childhood home. It’s not clear from Lennon’s presentation of Loesch’s role in the scandal whether Lennon views these events as evil or simply unfortunate. To my mind there is no ambiguity. They were evil. The lack of moral compass or learning throughout the book left me feeling dirty and disheartened at its conclusion.
On my buy, borrow, skip scale: A weak borrow -
A fine, disturbing, nearly unbalanced novel about a man who returns to his hometown after decades and buys a strange piece of property in the woods. Then crazy shit starts to pile up: albino deer, deeds with names erased, myths about some weird university pyschology professor who's taking Skinner's ideas a bit too far.
The first 150 pages or so are riveting.
If you haven't read any of Lennon's work (which I personally believe is grossly underappreciated) then this is not a bad place to start with. -
http://www.dailycamera.com/ci_1312238...
Book review: "Castle"
by Jenny Shank
Posted: 05/30/2009 09:34:00 AM MDT
J. Robert Lennon's new novel "Castle" begins simply: "In the late winter of 2006, I returned to my home town and bought 612 acres of land on the far western edge of the country." The narrator, Eric Loesch, has come back to Gerrysburg, the town where he grew up in upstate New York, and for many chapters that's all the reader learns about his past. Lennon treats us to a good dose of Loesch's personality and code of living, however, through his interactions with a realtor, a hardware store employee, and a librarian: Loesch is exacting, disinclined to self-revelation, precise, and a harsh judge of other people. "Castle" bears the wit and inventiveness of Lennon's previous books, but it surpasses them in its psychological complexity.
At first the reader is put in the position of the other townspeople -- who strike us as normally inquisitive but seem nosy to Loesch -- we want to know more about Eric's background and what his business will be in this economically depressed town. Unwilling to indulge idle curiosity, Loesch purchases outright an old house in the middle of a dense wood and sets about renovating it without explaining himself to anyone.
Lennon cleverly releases hints at the many mysteries underlying "Castle" -- Loesch worked in "infrastructure and information," he's "very handy," and two unspeakable occurrences happened to him, one in childhood, one during his working life, that were notable enough that people read about them in newspapers. He has an estranged sister who turns up on his doorstep one day. Loesch evaluates her in this manner: "Living had changed her. Whereas I had staved off the worst effects of aging with exercise, self-discipline, and healthy eating, Jill had indulged herself from an early age, abusing her body, sleeping irregularly, and running with a dissolute, irresponsible crowd." He dispatches his sister quickly.
Loesch seems to have plenty of money and no work to report to, so he doesn't appear to have much to do, but his house keeps giving him assignments. Mysterious provocations arise, such as the fact that the name of the previous owner of the house has been blacked out on all the documents connected to its purchase, and Loesch discovers there is a small parcel of land in the middle of his property that he does not own, according to the documentation.
The forest around the house is almost impenetrable, populated by few creatures apart from a white deer of the sort that is frequently seen in the area -- except that this one turns out to be a particularly helpful deer. Loesch hikes into the woods and discovers a small castle there, like the one he saw in a child's drawing that he found when cleaning out the house. Objects disappear, and other mysteries ensue, giving the appearance of supernatural occurrences. But as Lennon gradually peels back the layers of his story, he reveals that at its core lie several incidents that are as real as the headlines of yesterday's newspaper.
Eric Loesch is unlikable in the sense that you probably wouldn't want to meet him and thereby become a target of his insults, but his perspective is relentlessly enjoyable because of the caustic wit of his insights about himself and others.
He offends the realtor when he interprets her overture of friendship as romantic interest, and nearly gets into a fistfight at the hardware store when he won't let the clerk help him carry his purchases to the car. Loesch must return to the hardware store several more times, and tries to avoid the clerk that he'd fought with, "But," as Loesch describes, "in a frustrating trick of fate, the man in front of me had some intractable problem involving his company charge account," and he's forced to confront the clerk again, who greets him by name. "I noticed that his name tag read RANDALL. But I declined to use this information." Loesch's voice is consistently droll, or at least it seems that way until the events of his past surface and cast his attitude in a different light.
"Castle" is a great ride, and it's a difficult book to discuss without spoiling any of its many surprises. When Lennon reveals the answers to the mystery, it's both satisfying and horrifying. The ending makes you want to turn back to the beginning, which doesn't seem so funny any more. -
What an extraordinary piece of work this is. When our first-person narrator, Eric, arrives in a rural area of upstate New York to buy a dilapidated house near a stuffy small town, we assume this is going to be one of those business-as-usual tales of dire events in the past coming home to roost in the present. In a sense, this is indeed what happens, but not at all could it be said that Castle is business as usual.
We soon become aware that Eric is no flawless hero, and perhaps no hero at all. His voice is one of prissy, selfconscious pedantry (the effect should be dull but in fact is surprisingly readable), as if he were focusing great effort on distancing himself from the world; the first time he falls prey to an irrational fear -- in this instance, of going down into the house's cellar -- we find this diagnosis fairly accurate, for he tells us how he years ago learned to conquer fear by converting it into anger. Of course, this means he's prey to fits of irrational anger, but Eric evidently hasn't solved that last piece of the equation.
On the property he's just bought there's a huge rock, and right next to it there's an area, undetailed on his map, that has been specifically declared not part of the sale to him. Of course, that makes him all the keener to find out what's there -- not a task so easy as it might seem because he keeps getting inexplicably lost in the woodland between his house and the rock . . . and this despite, as he several times primly reminds us, his impeccable sense of direction. But eventually he makes it and discovers that the little bit of verboten terrain contains a decrepit castle.
Soon he starts recovering memories that he has clearly been carefully keeping at a distance from himself, memories of how his childhood was largely taken over by a crazed behavioral psychologist, Avery Stiles, who through a sadistic course of treatment trained the young Eric into, near enough, psychopathy -- hence this distancing we've been noticing all through the text. Eric's not a serial killer, or anything so corny, but his numbing of himself to the world and to other people means he has the potential to commit great evil. And in the second, more recent flood of memories that he reveals to us, we discover that the evil he has indeed committed is of a kind that we should have expected from the training he received in his impressionable youth . . .
Castle isn't a thriller in the conventional sense -- although Lennon was able to make my pulse pound when he wanted it to. Instead it's a perfectly controlled, near-allegorical unpicking of not just this country's most recent defining moment but also a longer, slower cancer that's most often ignored or even lauded. That could, of course, have been -- however worthy! -- a recipe for tedium. But no: Castle had me transfixed throughout.
Addendum: I've just discovered that the GoodReads/Amazon computer has categorized this book as horror. Gawdelpus. Horrifying in its implications, yes; but horror it ain't. -
J. Robert Lennon's fourth novel starts out in a familiar territory, but quickly strays from the path, following signs and markers from ghost stories and fairy tales. Eric Loesch has returned to rural upstate New York to renovate a house on a large parcel of land he has purchased. Although it's not clear why Loesch has come home, it quickly becomes apparent that something is very wrong. The forest behind his house beckons, but it rebuffs Loesch's efforts to explore it with inexplicable hostility. When he does manage to penetrate the perimeter, Loesch quickly finds himself disoriented in a dark and preternaturally quiet wood, calling to mind stories of New England's haunted forests. He's infatuated with an elusive and seemingly sentient white deer, but the discovery of a malevolent presence in his domain threatens to upset the peace Loesch craves.
Or does he want something else? At home, Loesch goes about his business with admirable efficiency, but his interactions with the people in town range from brusque to outright offensive. Some believe family secrets brought him back; others suspect he's involved in an infamous military scandal; but everyone agrees that he's wound too tight. When his search to learn the identity of the land's previous owner reveals that a mysterious figure owns a strange castle in the heart of his property, Loesch all but becomes unhinged.
Castle is a masterpiece of mood with an atmosphere suffused with dread. Even the discovery of a pile of moldy old books is freighted with the hysterical realism of Gothic horror. Loesch's isolation and decline are reminiscent of Irish Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea — the story of a man whose view of the world and his place in it dominates the narrative but proves to be utterly unreliable.
In the second half of the novel, Lennon weaves the multiple strands of Loesch's bizarre past with the strange hell of his present. In many respects, Castle mines the same territory as Paul Auster's Man in the Dark, but is a vastly superior book. Not every novelist has the courage to embrace a protagonist who has deceived himself in precisely the same way thuggish theocrats deceive their citizens.
-
I don't quite know what to make of this book. At first I had hopes of a spupernatural twist, a la
House of Leaves, but that was not to be. "Psychological suspense" doesn't cover it, either. The story could just about be described as "psychological" but it lacked any "suspense" elements. The language is quite formal and the protagonist, Eric Loesch, is not especially likeable, but in an oddly dispassionate way. One does not seem to be required to have any strong feelings about him or the things that happen to him. I was reminded very much of the writings of
Thomas H. Cook, especially when Loesch begins to describe his childhood esperiences, which strain credibility. At least Cook is able to draw one into his characters' dysfunctions; unfortunately, Loesch's alienation only serves to alienate the reader. -
A confusing book, written from the perspective, I take it, of someone suffering from post traumatic stress. He moves back to his home town and buys a house that needs a lot of repairs. Early on we see that he has trouble dealing with people, that he is good at repairing his house, that he has problems with his sister that comes from their childhood, that his parents are dead (murder/suicide?) There is a mystery involved, along with his house he has a a large parcel of land, in the midst of his land is a plot that he does not own. What I could not wrap my mind around was finding out that he had blocked a lot of his childhood out of his mind, that he knew the man who owned the house, that he had known what was on that parcel of land in the middle of his property. The whole thing didn't work for me.
-
I liked this book until the end. The end made me feel ripped off. It was unbelievable to me. Both the millitary parts (my husband is in the army, and been over there, and we know what it is really like), and the main character's eventual killing of his teacher, for which there was no good explanation for after so many years. The seeming supernatural element went nowhere either. Had that element been expanded and woven in to the story instead of being a useless detail, the book could have been much better. The beginning was good, and grabbed me, so I kept reading, even after it began to seem quite convoluted.
-
Wonderful writer - insightful, masterly with description. Also the author of MAILMAN, which is one of the funniest portraits of outright despair I have read. CASTLE is very different to MAILMAN, and the first two thirds had me spellbound and walking into walls. Very ambitious novel about memory, abuse, mental illness, with a mystery at its heart that actually reminded me of LOST. I think it takes a great writer to be able to render moving to a small town and renovating a house in such an interesting and absorbing way. A keeper.
-
This. Book. Was. Awful. Do not read this book. Do not pick up this book, because you will think that maybe it can redeem itself and you will be wrong but you will finish the book and then your brain will hurt and you will have nothing to say except that this book is awful.
read more... -
downloaded audio by Iambik for review
ARC for review by publisher
Listened 2/16/12 - 2/23/12
3 Stars - Recommended to readers who don't mind the spooky stuff turning out to be not-so-spooky
Audio Download (approx 10 hrs)
Publisher: Iambik / Graywolf Press
Narrator: Mark Douglas Nelson
I dig suspense as much as the next guy. Gimme a book with some creepy old farmhouse full of strange noises at night, surrounded by over 600 acres of dense dark woods, and you've got yourself one happy little reader. The only thing that could ruin a book like this would be if it failed to live up to its own hype, right?
Ooh Castle, how you built me up only to bring me down, slowly and angrily, to beat my fists against the muddy humus beneath my knees...
J. Robert Lennon's Castle initially came to me as a review copy, among others, from the lovely ladies at Graywolf Press. Somehow, it fell to the wayside and began to get buried beneath the other, newer review copies that were arriving... and I've always felt horrible about that.
A few months ago, however, I ran across the audiobook on Iambik's website and realized that this was my chance to finally get it read. Much, much sooner than I would ever get to it in print copy, too! And so it became my commuting companion for the entire week.
It all begins with Eric Loesch, an apparently unstable and irritable man, and his purchase of an old abandoned farmhouse upon returning to his hometown. As he peruses the deed to the property, he discovers a small portion of land, deep within his woods, that does not belong to him. Bent on uncovering the identity of the person who has gone to great lengths to hide their ownership of whatever lies hidden back there in the forest, Eric displays unusual suspicion towards the townspeople, many of whom seem to remember him - though he does not appear to remember them. Callous and cold, he seems to harbor a strong dislike for unnecessary human contact and will go to great extremes to protect his privacy when he feels someone may be placing it in jeopardy.
While seeking out whatever information he can about the mysteriously blackened out name on the house papers, Eric begins to renovate the farmhouse. He appears to be suspended in a state of constant unease whenever he is in and around his house, suffering from a strange, unexplained fear of the basement and waking in the night to the sounds of crying or keening, or whistling?
As the home renovations come to an end, Eric rewards himself with a little trek through his woods to the large outcropping of rock that's visible from his bedroom window. Priding himself on his flawless sense of direction, he makes slow and aggravating headway through the thick and gloomy forest, eventually losing track of time and getting himself lost. Just as panic is threatening to grip his heart, suddenly - out of nowhere - a white deer appears and leads him out of the woods safely. (Though he is not sure why, he feels a connection to what he calls his deer.) On his second attempt, he successfully reaches the rock outcropping but manages to lose his backpack which contains all of his supplies and a change of clothes. Yet what bothers him more is what he finds on the other side of that large, slick boulder. It's a miniature castle, just as dilapidated as the farmhouse he brought back to life, and he immediately understands that this impenetrable fortress does not belong to him.
Sounds like a good set up so far, doesn't it? You have to give props to Lennon for not showing his hand too early... the man knows how to draw out the suspense. Throughout the first half of the book, as you get to know Eric, as the little nuances of his personality come to light - how quick to anger he is, how he holds everyone around him in such contempt, how much more intelligent he believes himself to be, his incredible sense of entitlement - you begin to wonder just how much Eric knows... about himself. I mean, is it really possible for this guy to be such a crass, volatile person? What is it about his fellow humans that he finds so disgusting?
Over the course of the second half of the book - without giving too much away - he begins to recall the shitty, abusive childhood he suffered at the hands of his indifferent parents and a wacky, loose-cannon sort of psychologist; and about his career in the military and the reason he headed back to his hometown, and things start to come into focus for us. Sadly, the more we learn about Eric and his motives, the less spooky or supernatural the whole first half of the book starts to seem. Towards the end, I got the feeling that the author just sort of ran out of steam and settled with a hum-drum ending just to get the whole thing over with. To say the ending was depressing and a let-down would be an understatement.
To be honest, as the end of the book was drawing near and I was still struggling to make heads or tales of what was going on, I thought up at least two other directions the author could have chosen to take that would have kept me happy and maintained the overall creepy/uncertain theme he had going on.
The narrator that Iambik chose for this audiobook threw me off quite a bit. Mark Douglas Nelson's voice sounds like that of a much older man, causing me to assume Eric Loesch was a man in his late 50's or early 60's, when in reality he may have been closer to 30 or 40. Though, as booksexyreview and I discussed the audio in detail, during the week that we were listening to it (she was always a few chapters ahead of me) she pointed out that the things that bothered me about Mark - his long drawn out but's... and his extremely proper pronunciations - were actually quite a good fit for the strange and awkward Eric. At the time, I found it difficult to agree with her because it was all quite distracting to me. But now that I have put some space between me and the book, I think I can see where she was coming from.
So, a mediocre review for a middle of the road sort of book. While nothing to write home about, it might be worth a flip through on a slow, rainy afternoon when you've got some time to kill and no expectations to kill it with. -
This is a heady mix of psychological thriller, gothic mystery (a castle after all), and my least favorite, a trauma narrative. The narration is skillfully accomplished, given a first-person protagonist who may or may not remember key aspects of his past, may or may not be hallucinating new events, and is certainly misunderstanding much of what is happening around him. The reader is let it in on… some of this. What I like best are the quasi-supernatural/heightened realism/possibly imagined elements of the novel. However, the psychological backstory was a bit too heavy handed for me , much of it revealed in kind of a dump at the end. Also, why do so many authors pile on their characters? One major trauma is damaging enough! This guy has 3-5, depending how you count. Nonetheless, I might teach this if I did a class on war narratives, and I would read more by this author.
-
A little bit like The Dinner in that nothing that is happening is what you think it is.
-
I got this book through Amazon Vine as an uncorrected proof; it actually isn't released until April '09
This book was not what I expected it to be. It starts as a chilling mystery. Eric moves to a secluded town and purchases 600+ acres of land there. He works to renovate the house and eventually learns that there is a small portion of land in the middle of his property that he doesn't own. Here starts the mystery on his journey to find out exactly what is out there on that land and who owns it. As the book continues it, in my opinion, degrades into a commentary on current society and military institutions. If you are shaking your head wondering how we got from point A to point B here...well I am kind of still trying to figure that out too.
This writing style of this book is difficult to explain. Personally I found it very hard to start reading the book but once I had started reading the book grabbed me and pulled me onto the next chapter. I found this happened every time I would start reading the next part of the book. I think maybe there was just too much description; Eric describes every little action he takes. Sometimes this description adds to the story but most of the time it seemed a bit over the top. I also thought that the dialogue between characters in the book was poorly done. I know Eric is supposed to lack social skills; but even the people he talked too had very unnatural and stilted sounding dialogue. I also agree with other reviewers that have said the last 1/3 of the book was strange and kind of ruined the book for me.
It is somewhat difficult to fully review this book without some spoilers so in the section below I will discuss a couple things that bothered me that are SPOILERS; so skip it if you don't want to know.
****************SPOILER START****************
I found it very odd that Eric had no idea who Dr. Avery was initially but then all of the sudden he starts having all these childhood memories about Dr. Avery. I guess we were supposed to see that Eric suppressed these childhood memories? I am not sure and this could have been better conveyed.
The details of what happened to Eric in the military really didn't need to be laid out like they were. It would have kept the mysterious tone of the novel if the readers were allowed to use there own imagination. I thought throwing this part in at the end forced this novel into being a social commentary, it took a good suspenseful novel and tried to force it to be something more. It seemed silly.
***************SPOILER END******************
Overall this book was a difficult and, in the end, disturbing and uncomfortable read. It didn't entertain me as much as it irritated me; I was grateful that it is a relatively short book. Still the book did pull me through once I got into it; at least in the beginning. I just think people should know that this book is a commentary on society and government rather than an entertaining read. I don't see myself reading any of this author's past or future work; this type of book just isn't my thing. -
A short book with some big, big twists; the biggest surprise of all being, perhaps, just how well the disparate elements manage to cohere. Castle starts out as the disturbingly vivid portrait of a sociopath--one you can't help but assume, simply by the fact of his incorrigible oddness, must be on his way toward a destructive, possibly murderous act. But one of the book's first major surprises is just how engaging and relatable its antiheroic, undemonstrative protagonist turns out to be. (There's definitely a lesson here about how first-person narration can make even the most unlikable personalities sympathetic.) As our understanding of Eric's childhood deepens, we can't help but develop a rooting interest; Castle evolves into more than a mere dispassionate character study as we begin to flash back to the monstrous abuse Eric suffered as a boy. Mix in elements of psychological horror and the effect is quite riveting. Lennon's execution is masterful, not only for the fusion of genre trappings, but for the way Eric's matter-of-fact voice contrasts the introduction of the surreal. No matter how precipitous, at times, the unbelievable and inexplicable come crashing into the world as we know it (or think we know it), Eric's phlegmatic description of events keeps us off-balance, uncertain: we don't know what's real, what's in his head, just how reliable or unreliable a narrator he is. One of the book's most astonishing reveals is, in fact, the creeping awareness that holy shit, this is all real (maybe).
As for the final twist, the final revelatory flashback, the conclusive piece of the existential puzzle--I can imagine a large percentage of readers hurling the book across the room at this point, and not entirely without cause. But again, the biggest surprise here is just how well so prodigious a temporal and geographic leap manages to work for me. And while the book comes dangerously close to sermonizing in the remaining pages, I actually think it all adds up to be quite a fascinating and thought-provoking account of events that, for all their topicality, for all the international shitstorm they caused, have largely escaped the kind of rigorous examination they deserve. Maybe because they're just so unutterably heinous, such a stain on our national character--which we have a real problem admitting is pretty goddamn ugly-looking right about now.
J. Robert Lennon dares to go there. This guy's creative writing classes must be fun. -
I've thought many times what I would say for a review of this book. I can't emphasize how much I loathed reading this. It was 21 chapters of pure hell to be stuck "in the head" of the first person narrative of the protagonist. I wanted to scream and many times found myself audibly scoffing at him, shaking my head. How sad for me. Here's some great reasons to avoid this garbage:
1) The guy it's about is offended by anybody and everybody. Most pages are filled with his emotional tirades of how somebody offended him, his huffy emotions over it, him being a judgmental fool and social retard etc. It gets so old I wanted to kill myself or worse. I guess kudos to the author for doing such a good job making somebody realistic that way but think about it: realistic in a way that makes you want to run screaming.
2) The wordy writing style is almost interesting but fails as it flops into the category of trying too hard. The type of convoluted over-wordiness a new writer abuses in trying to sound smart - coming from first person (so, nobody talks that way) and a common guy.
3) I felt no sense of mystery, chill, spookiness or whatever else, only a sense of "will I ever get thru this??" I found it all utterly lame, not gripping and completely icky-for lack of a better word-especially at some parts toward the end. I don't mind trudging thru some sludge if it's for a great less or literary prize, as the case with a lot of classics; this was just trudging thru sludge to come out at a cesspit. -
I was in the mood to read something different and try out a new author so I picked up Castle based on a positive review. The book started out a bit slow, but with some promise of developing into an enthralling mystery/thriller. Although the protagonist was anything but likable (a hyper-masculine, socially awkward, military type) and the setting grim (a rundown farm house in the middle of nowhere surrounding by an impenetrable forest), I was nevertheless hooked within a few chapters. The mysterious white deer, the creepy forest full of menacing trees and underbrush but no wildlife, the castle built into the side of the rock, the main character's secret past and hazy childhood memories, all of these elements kept me reading on. In the end though the story turned out to be a rambling, nonsensical, disappointment. Between the endless flashbacks and attempts to politicize the story through weak connections to recent military history, the last few chapters were barely readable. I understood where the author was trying to go with the story and the statement he was trying to make with his references to the current war in Iraq, but for me, he just didn't quite pull it off. There are better books out there, so don't bother reading this one.
-
This book is a psychological journey from start to finish, and its implications reach deeply within and all around us, from the nuclear American family to the treatment of Iraqi POWs by American soldiers. J. Robert Lennon has accomplished something truly special.
Protagonist Eric Loesch's relationship with his father, revealed gradually throughout the novel, mirrors that of many a real life 1950s-1970s American father/son relationship, at least those about which I've read or been told in which the father's fears and insecurities manifest in the form of coldness and a desire for discipline, a need to instill strength in his son. This desire/need leads Eric's father, we learn, to a decision that changes the course of Eric's life, makes him a different person than he possibly could've otherwise become, and gives readers the brilliant story that unfolds piece by eagerly awaited piece.
In the end, I found myself questioning my own psychological conditioning, my own limitations as a man and how those limitations came to be and what, if anything, I can do to overcome them.
The book is a little spooky, whimsical at times, always intelligent and smooth reading, and I couldn't put it down. In my opinion, it's a must read.
