Telephone

A man is watching his 12 year old daughter succumb to an obscure disease that will destroy her eyesight, plague her with seizures, and eventually swallow her in dementia before she dies. That part of the novel is vividly told in acute detail and with gripping sensitivity regarding the effects of this on the man, his wife, and their marriage.
At the same time, he is caught in a mystery when he finds an SOS in the pocket of a mail order jacket. To distract himself from his grief he tries to unravel the mystery and finally, in an act of bravery, he rescues a group of women from a sweatshop. Courage, albeit somewhat reckless, provides solace in the face of unbearable events beyond his control.

Exceptionally good. Reads effortlessly, but every sentence contains some thrill and you never know what's coming next. Everett can just fucking write, his prose is magnetic. This is a novel of grief and madness, sad, ironic, adjective-defying. I'm certain the final episode is Zach's dream, wish-fulfillment, fantasy. I think he kills himself after killing Sarah.

Everett already seems to be playing games with your mind before you even open this book — it’s called Telephone, for no very obvious reason, but the cover image shows three vignettes of someone holding an old-fashioned military-style compass in their left hand, pointing in different directions between NW and NE. Your guess is as good as mine…

The point of the novel seems to be to investigate the difficult situation we find ourselves in when something bad is happening around us and we find ourselves powerless to do anything constructive to help. Narrator Zach Wells, who teaches palaeontology at a university in California, is faced with this when his young daughter is diagnosed with an incurable degenerative disease, while an admired show more colleague at work is struggling to meet the university’s demands for academic success. And then he finds little notes in Spanish, appealing for help, tucked into the secondhand clothing he buys on the internet and decides that they must be from victims of human trafficking.

It turns out to be the third and most quixotic of these three situations where he is able to make at least a small difference — thanks to accepting the help of some strangers he happens to meet along the way — and it seems to be this intervention that gives him the strength to be able to carry on facing the other two, where his help has turned out to be essentially useless. But Everett doesn’t spell this out. It’s up to us to work out what we want to take from this book, strewn as it is with apparently random bone fragments, chess moves, medieval paintings and passing bears. But no obvious telephones (or compasses). We have to do the palaeontology ourselves… show less

Zach Wells is nearly as rocky as the fossils he investigates as a paleobiologist. Only his 12 year old daughter, Sarah, softens his heart even whilst she is destroying him at chess. When Sarah misses an obvious move in a chess game, Zach is surprised. Later that surprise turns to concern, then worry, and then his worst fears get realized. Sarah is diagnosed with a particularly aggressive form of Batten disease which will lead to dementia, loss of function, and death. Zach is not able to cope. And neither is his wife, Meg. Their future looks bleak.

Percival Everett takes his time revealing the multiple sources of Zach’s emotional ossification. In the end, it is surprising perhaps that he ever had a solid relationship with his wife. But show more Sarah is someone who always gives him a reason to go on. Until that reason begins to evaporate. Soon Zach is clutching at almost any reason and his need drives him to increasingly irrational actions. However, along with despair and dread, Percival Everett acknowledges the place of hope in our lives.

This is a beautifully written novel with exquisite pacing and anxiety-producing scenes. Its ending is nowhere near what I had anticipated. And yet it felt absolutely right.

Definitely recommended. show less

There is nothing worse, certain painful and deadly diseases notwithstanding, than an unsatisfactory, piss-poor truth, whereas a satisfactory lie is all too easy to accept, even embrace, get cozy with.

Zach Wells is doing fine. He's a geologist/paleobiologist professor who feels like he's teaching on autopilot some days and there's a woman in his department who is probably not going to get tenure, but that's not his problem. His marriage feels dry, but they both love their daughter, so she keeps them together and, overall, life in Altadena, California is fine enough.

Then Zach has to deal with a pushy student and he finds himself drawn into his colleague's tenure worries. He receives an odd note, tucked into a jacket he ordered on-line show more and his daughter has been having some memory issues and blank spells that can't easily be explained.

Here a father is stretched to the breaking point by his daughter's illness. Searching for distraction, he focuses on the slip of paper found in a garment he ordered off of eBay. This is a novel about loss and about discovering what's really important, about doing something because it's the right thing to do, without much hope of success, and also about how we distract ourselves from things that are too painful to be present for. I'm a huge fan of [[Percival Everett]]'s work and this novel amplifies my admiration. Everett plays with the trust the reader has for the protagonist-narrator as he has done in previous novels.

This is published in three different versions, I read the "A" version and now am on a quest to find the other two. It's a challenge because it's impossible to tell the difference when ordering on-line, so it may take awhile, in this age of COVID, to track down the other two versions. show less

Knowing going in that this book is mainly about a father who loses his young daughter to a horrible disease, I thought it was going to be heart-breaking or difficult to read, but it wasn't. This is because the narrator and father, Zach, seems so disconnected from what is happening. So the story is less about the death of a child and more about the strange ways we have of dealing with grief. I also knew there were three different versions of the book, although I didn't know which version I was reading until I finished. And that again reinforces the disconnectedness--is the story we are getting the right one? Because depending on the version, the reader gets a slightly different version. But that happens with everything we read, doesn't show more it? The message is always filtered and changed by its recipient. And I think that this novel is ultimately trying to convey how grief, extreme grief, is a singular thing for each individual, just as reading a novel is a singular thing for each reader. Even trying to express grief will result in a garbled message, like in the childhood game Telephone; no one else can truly know what that griever is experiencing. Is grief then, ultimately like dying, which is also a singular and unknowable experience?

Ok, I'm not sure exactly what I'm trying to say here. I found reading this book to be an absorbing and also puzzling experience. I'm sure I will be thinking about this book for quite some time. show less

"Some people are just no good at being happy. And by some people, I mean me."

Zach Wells, a geology professor, finds his life crumbling when his beloved daughter begins suffering from a mysterious illness. One day,as he puts on a shirt newly ordered from eBay, he finds stashed in a pocket a note seeking help. Thus begins his quest to find the note's author, and to see what he can do to help.

This book thoroughly engaged me. What Zach finds on his quest brings us right into today's headlines about human-trafficking, but in addition the book is a masterful exploration of grief and how we handle grief.

After finishing the book, I read on Amazon that there are 3 versions of the book, though I'm not sure how they differ, and I'm not sure which show more version I read. I won't be seeking other versions of this book to read, but I will be seeking other books by Percival Everett to read.

4 stars show less