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Title: The Pharmacist's Mate: A Story of Birth, Death, Guitars, and Goldfish by Amy Fusselman ISBN: 0-14-200235-6 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: November, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (9 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Human Look at the Mystery of Life
Comment: I just finished Amy Fusselman's book and loved it! Every page was full of humanity and great heart.
I very much related to her story on a personal level. The mix of Life and death is ironic. There was a lot of wisdom and recognition in her book of the mystery of Life with a beautiful view, it was moving. I couldn't put it down and finished it in one day (rare for me). I wholeheartedly recommend this book.
Rating: 5
Summary: The Pharmacist's Mate
Comment: In his essay "On Writing," Raymond Carver gave a great bit of advice: No tricks. In true Carver fashion, he'd pared this down from Geoffrey Wolff's edict, No cheap tricks. Carver's skeletal prose is largely out of fashion now, which is sort of a shame, because Amy Fuesselman's The Pharmacist's Mate proves that honest, bare bones writing is still capable of tremendous power.
The Pharmacist's Mate is a brief, though not slight, meditation on death, birth, family and music. I found the parts about music particularly interesting, with Fusselman veering as she does between the visceral powers of sea shanties, AC/DC's "Hell's Bells," and "Row Row Row Your Boat." In Fusselman's world, music is one of our most mysterious properties. It takes up space, fills whole stadiums, whips up emotion and inspires devotion, yet it remains invisible, something that can't be touched.
Of course, death is just as intangible. But rather than fill space, it sucks people into it. "After (my dad) died," Fusselman writes, "I saw that people and space are permeable to each other in a way that people and people are not. I saw that space is like water. People can go inside it." And we are there with her, with her family, around her father's deathbed when he finally slips into the space between them.
But this book isn't merely about his dying. He is alive in these pages, too, in the form of journal entries from his days in the Merchant Marine. These are the most priceless sections of the book. They speak in the voice of a young man learning about the world (literally). He shoots sea gulls with a pea shooter, practices using a sextant and treats his shipmates for shock and VD. My favorite line (written after some of the crew on his ship leaves): "I sure hated to see Freddy Hoeske go, for he was my best buddy."
The Pharmacist's Mate defies easy categorization, but I guess you could call it a memoir. It succeeds, though, where other contemporary memoirs fail (or worse, become a big boring mess of solipsism and self-pity) because it reflects something larger than the interests of the author. (For a touchstone example of this, see Martin Amis's Experience, which is very, very great.) It does this, in part, because the writing is lean and disciplined. That's the quality that I admire most.
Rating: 2
Summary: an unedited disappointment
Comment: This book is not without its strengths. The selections from the author's father's journal are interesting. And I do not discount the personal experiences described, either the father's death, or the author's fertility treatments. The problem is that, as written, there is only enough real material for a long magazine article. The rest consists largely of references to what the author is eating, wearing, or listening to on the radio. It is difficult to imagine what, if anything, has been excised. In one excruciatingly cloying passage, the author repeatedly refers to herself in the third person as 'the possibly pregnant person.' I am an enthusiastic reader of McSweeney's, and wanted to like this, but could not. That said, Ms. Fusselman has a good grasp of language, and may have a better book ahead of her.
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Title: The Solace of Leaving Early by Haven Kimmel ISBN: 1400033349 Publisher: Anchor Pub. Date: 13 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Waiting for April: A Novel by Scott M. Morris ISBN: 1565123700 Publisher: Algonquin Books Pub. Date: March, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: This Shape We're In by Jonathan Lethem ISBN: 0970335520 Publisher: McSweeney's Books Pub. Date: 05 February, 2001 List Price(USD): $9.00 |
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Title: Samuel Johnson Is Indignant: Stories by Lydia Davis ISBN: 0312420560 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 01 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Post Office by Charles Bukowski ISBN: 0876850867 Publisher: Black Sparrow Press Pub. Date: October, 1981 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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