Caris O'Malley

Caris O'Malley must be clairvoyant, because in writing The Egg Said Nothing, he has clearly been channeling the ghost of Kurt Vonnegut. This is not a bad thing, however, as Vonnegut is one of this reviewer's favorite writers of all time.

Manny is a shut-in and a loner. He sits in his dark apartment, up all night watching late night television. He pays his bills by stealing change from local fountains (he justifies this by saying that they are no longer people's wishes once they hit corporate show more waters and become extra income for those who don't need it). He has a somewhat sketchy relationship with his senile mother. Until he wakes up one morning to find that he has laid an egg. Or he thinks he's laid an egg. All he knows is that he woke up with an egg sitting between his legs. Where else could it have come from? So you start to wonder if this is going to be more Kafkaesque and if Manny is going to turn into a chicken.

Thus begins Manny breaking from his routine has he tries to nurture the egg like any loving parent would do. Well, a loving parent from another species, maybe, but a loving parent nonetheless. He meets and starts a relationship with Ashley, a waitress at a local diner. And then thing really take off and his life takes a turn for the weird as he discovers the true contents of the egg an begins receiving messages and visitations from himself in the future.

“Listen: Manny has come unstuck in time.” Or that's what I expected to read at some point. The second half of the novel is heavily steeped in time travel and determinism. Like I said, O'Malley would probably make Vonnegut proud. As he starts to play with time very heavily, it can get a bit confusing, especially in keeping track of Manny's different selves as they appear and disappear, not to mention the true nature of the egg. Early on, you start to wonder why this title would be part of the Bizarro fiction line of books as it seems unusually normal during the first half or so (aside from the protagonist laying an egg), but about halfway through the weirdness is ramped up big time.

This becomes a problem. The heavy weirdness starts so fast after a somewhat leisurely pace that the reader could feel like they're getting literary whiplash. As such, uneven pacing contributes to some of the confusion I felt during the second half of the book. The reader might actually feel the need to start keeping a flowchart just to keep things straight in their head. I'll admit that I was trying to mentally do so. Then again, with novels that play with time, this isn't always unusual. On the other hand, the author kicks it up a few notches, making it feel like you need to be a Timelord to figure out who, what, and when people are from.

Despite this gripe, The Egg Said Nothing is still an excellent story that deserves your attention. At its heart, when you strip away the science fiction elements and the weirdness, it becomes a novel about the ultimate loser trying to break out of his own shell and not be such a loser anymore, to be someone and do something that matters, and how the most insignificant person could change the world simply by existing.

The Egg Said Nothing gets a solid 4 out of 5 stars. I hope this is not the last we'll see of Caris O'Malley, as I would really like to read more from him. My only suggestion is that he works on his pacing a little bit. show less

The Egg Said Nothing is a hot mess of awesome-sauce. It's hard to avoid spoilers when discussing this book, but I've dosed this review with them liberally.

First off, the main character is a hot mess. He can barely keep his shit together. An utter basket case who would likely be a suicide risk if observed by a doctor. The guy lives off spare change collected from water fountains, and his mother's deceased husband's pension. He has zero relationships...until now...Dunt, duh-dunt duhnnn! MAJOR show more SPOILER:He kills her. Sort of. Not sort of kills her, she is killed. It's just sort of him. Ermm. Never mind.

Second off, the plot involves a hot mess of time travel*. The Egg Said Nothing has a web of time traveling lines that looks like this:



It's like an angry fist of pathways through time and space. Really, don't try to make sense of it. Don't. Don't think too hard. Just enjoy the brilliance of (MAJOR SPOILER) a guy who goes back in time over and over again trying to kill himself in an orgy of self-suicide bombers. It hardly matters if it could really be charted out logically. The Egg Said Nothing is not a logical story; it's an emotional one. The Egg Said Nothing is a story about self-hatred. Delusion. It's a metaphor for how we sabotage ourselves. It's about blame...with maybe a little forgiveness. It's about how a twisted childhood can result in a loop of self-destruction.

This is a short novella, so there's no reason not to give it a read. It might just give you a good whack in the head with a shovel...treat your kids right or the results won't be pretty. Although it might make for an interesting story.

*The back of the book does give away this particular plot twist, but I'm not going to give it away here. I usually don't read the backs of books because I prefer to let the author take me through the plot. show less

If the one unforgivable sin in fiction is being predictable, I hereby declare this book to be free of sin! It was delightfully unpredictable at nearly every step. When the first page started off with the main character having laid an egg, I imagined this was going to be a variation on [book:Metamorphosis|485894], which I actually haven’t read, but I gather is about a guy turning into a bug, right? Well, it wasn’t that. Without going into spoilers, the book turned out to be kind of like show more target="_top">Timecop, if Timecop had been cool. More specifically if Timecop had somehow been written by whoever wrote Army of Darkness, or maybe Night of the Living Dead. Seriously, I lost track of how many shovel murders occur in this book. In this case, that isn’t a bad thing. It should be a point of pride to have readers lose track of how many times the narrator is killed with a shovel by time-traveling versions of himself!

So The Egg Said Nothing delivers the goods in the weirdness category. But that isn’t even the best part of it. I must admit that I found the character of Manny to be so oddly interesting, I would have been perfectly content to read a story about him in which nothing at all supernatural occurred. This is a guy who just never seems to be quite as appropriately freaked out as he should be ...by anything (for example, about the fact that he JUST LAID A FUCKING EGG!) He narrowly misses being accosted by a mugger, but instead of running like hell to make a safe getaway, he takes the time to notice that said mugger has a roll of quarters on him. Being both paranoid and also possessing a roll of quarters back at his apartment, Manny figures the mugger must have just stolen the roll from his place (?!) and demands “Where’d you get those quarters?”… “You’re gonna steal from me, you son of a bitch?” For some reason, that really entertained me. There’s just something so very Walter Sobchak about that. On one hand, he’s kind of a loser, living like a hermit in an apartment his mother pays rent on, and scraping together money for his electricity bill by collecting coins from public fountains. On the other hand, he’s the unbalanced genius who (in one version of the future) will figure out the key to manipulating time and space with his mind. Yet again: on one hand, he’s smart enough to outsmart his own future self, multiple times; but on the other hand, he’s also the same guy who’s stupid enough to be tricked by time-traveling earlier versions of himself! That’s the kind of book this is. The events occurring all around Manny are so unreal, he barely has the language to describe them, and yet somehow he seems to be able to process it all, and even devise an intelligent response which just might allow him (or at least one version of him) to win the day, save his life, bring his girlfriend back from the dead (sort of), and put history back on track!

Now that I think about it… forget the earlier stuff I said about Timecop and Army of Darkness… this is more like Big Lebowski meets Back to the Future. I think Manny would say don’t forget what I told you earlier.. I’ll just go back in time and kill the earlier version of myself that was writing that part!

In short, this was a very fun read which you can completely consume in one sitting. (83 pages, the perfect length for a short flight!) I was between giving it four stars and five. Four felt more honest, because when I originally put five, I wasn’t sure if it was for the book alone, or because I like the author (you can read a lot of his reviews here on GoodReads). Rounding down felt more honest, but 4.5 stars would be most accurate, if that were a choice. show less

Like an Old Testament prophet that has let his union dues lapse, Caris O'Malley's The Egg Said Nothing beckons to you from the dark alleyways of the unconscious. He smells funny, his hair is matted and he says the stories about handjobs aren't true. And then, before you know it, he's living with you: you're buying the redemption of violence and the prelapsarian wet dream. And the groceries, of course, because that shiftless s.o.b. sure as hell isn't buying anything.

My advice? Cereal. He show more hates it.

And be content in the knowledge that you can't be on the right side of History because History is a Möbius Strip.

Is it possible to be so self-aware of one's isolation that one replicates?

Consider this gem (lifted completely out of context, but it's a gem because it can be):

"It’s lonely knowing you're the only one living your life."

Yes, it is lonely knowing you're the only one living your life, but I feel a little less lonely for having read this book. show less