Book Review: In the Face of Adversity

Title: In the Face of Adversity

Author: Peter Martin

Quote: "His little sister's death had hit him hard."

This is literary fiction, not genre fiction. Literary fiction is allowed to be tragic, to have characters who are as un-dynamic and indecisive as real people and whose stories reach the same discouraging ends as those real people's stories do. 

After Billy's sister dies he's sent home from school for being sick. Walking into his home, he finds his mother in bed with a female friend. She then moves out with her girlfriend. Billy's father is an alcoholic and loses jobs, loses houses, loses furnished rooms. At last he decides to take Billy and move in with his wife and her girlfriend. By morning Billy has lost both parents and his innocence. He never finds his self-esteem again. There may be some hope for Billy, at the end, but he never does become anything remotely like a hero. 

Billy seems to me like today's man all right. Denatured. Sad. Passive. Jealous of a girlfriend, he picks a fight with the other boy at the table with her; he doesn't even see the blow coming as the other boy knocks him down with a broken nose. Feeling hurt when his wife deserts him, he expresses his feelings by getting himself fired from his job. He doesn't talk about his feelings; he is all about his feelings. He only lets himself express anger, but at his angriest he hurts himself more than anyone else. He feels terrible about the fact that nobody loves him. It does not occur to him that this might be because he doesn't love anybody. 

I'll stop before I give away the plot, such as it is. This book is really a novel-length character sketch. It lacks what some consider the essential core of a plot--that a character wants something, sets out to achieve that thing, and, by per own choices, gets or loses what person wants. Billy wants love but, if his waiting for women to make their moves can be called a way of pursuing love, then this story is all about how he fails with no hint of a possibility that he might ever succeed.

There are too many men like Billy in this world. Perhaps reading about him may help women avoid dating them and men avoid being them.