We the Animals (2011)

Torres gives us a unique perspective on coming of age. ( )

Brutal. Beautiful. For people who like their prose with a healthy dose of the sheer poetry of words, Justin Torres has written something that is practically perfect in every way. ( )

I finished this over the weekend too. (Long bus commute short book = getting through lots of books.) I was also lucky to hear him read at the National Book Festival yesterday as well. I know it seems like I five-star everything, but I think I just hit a good streak of books. This is an excellent short novel about a Puerto-Rican/American (weird to split that up, as PR is part of the US) family in upstate New York. Most of the novel consists of vignettes about the violent and yet somehow still loving relationship between all the members of the family. At times it is more like poetry, with long, rambling paragraphs, with the actual action kind of implied, which makes it more disturbing all the same. An excellent debut novel. ( )

Yes, it's well written. But I was conscious all the time that I was reading A Work of Art—that the story of these three boys growing up had been filtered and refined retrospectively by the eye, ear, and pen of the youngest, the "I" at the core of its largely first-person-plural narration. There's nothing wrong with that per se, but it means we receive the story, not via someone the protagonist's age, but via an adult whose primary concern is making art: it comes as material, not experience. And the experience is and should be what attracts a reader to these stories (they are strung together into a novel, but they can all stand alone quite well). The nature and expression of the bonds among brothers—moreover, brothers whose "Paps" is Puerto Rican and whose "Ma" is white, with all the differences that implies in views of masculinity and male roles—is fantastic material for a book. It shouldn't need to be told in the first person; it shouldn't matter that it culminates in a life and career for its narrator that tears the family apart. Frankly, I don't care and I don't want to know who the narrator becomes as an adult: I want to hear about the kids.

The last story, "The Night I Am Made" (the longest in the book, the only one with subsections of its own, the only one with a real plot involving multiple events, not just event epiphany)—that last story is where we're suddenly thrust into the narrator's adult, first-person-singular perspective. It tells the events and revelations which spell the end of the family unit, particularly the unit of "we" three brothers. It's a good story too, and it tells of an experience worth reading about, from the perspective of its more-or-less adult protagonist. (We can't help but suspect that protagonist is a version of the author. Is this really a novel, or is it a memoir?) But after 17 tales of the brothers-as-unit, it's an unwelcome shift. Joyce managed a smooth transition from the child's perspective to the adult's, and specifically the adult-as-writer, in [b:A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man|7588|A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man|James Joyce|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1309376772s/7588.jpg|3298883]. Sure, he was Joyce, but that means it can be done, and I didn't see it happening here.

I'd love to read the same stories told by Manny or Joel, rather than Justin.

(The book overall is remarkably similar to Malick's The Tree of Life, and the film has the same flaw: the Sean Penn character forces an adult perspective which is unnecessary and unwelcome, especially when the child's perspective has been presented so well. But, unless you're a very slow reader, the book will go faster!) ( )

This was a quick little read. I pretty much enjoyed up until the end when it was like where did that come from?! ( )