If you like farcical, madcap type humour, then maybe you’ll find more to laugh at than I did. The author is not the unfunniest writer I’ve read, by any stretch – there are several amusing lines in these 372 pages – but the humour I prefer depends on subtlety and truth and the constraints of realistic characters, and none of these elements are consistently present here. This wrongness greatly hinders the humour in Incredible Bodies, too. It reads like an open guitar chord played on the wrong fret. You know the feeling you get when struck by some observation that rings gorgeously true? This book bombards you with the exact opposite feeling – eliciting (in me anyway) groans and eye rolls and winces and various other more subtle twitches and expressions of dismay. Why is it bad? Well, for one thing the plot is preposterous and driven by actions totally contrary to the characters’ established natures and basically discordant with human nature in general. As such, it gives me no pleasure to say that this is a bad book. Furthermore, I work in academia and love comic novels, so I’m presumably the ideal audience for this campus romp. First, let me say that I read The North Water prior to this, and thought it was fantastic.
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