This book is less of a character study and more of a character vivisection. His past, his future, his present, in no particular order. That is all that we need to know and with magnificent restraint, that is all that Drew Magary tells us. There is one rule–if you leave “the Path”, you will die. Frankenstein…” dialogue, no attempt to give the events a veneer of pseudoscience at all. There is no big “chronosynclastic infundibulum” moment, no “As you know, Dr. On a routine business trip to meet with a supplier he takes a walk in the woods by his hotel and wanders out of the rational world into someplace else.Īnd here is where I start talking about why I call this book New Wave.
His children–two boys and a girl–are important to him in a understated way, like the architectural supports for a bridge that you drive over every day but never really look at. His wife is a nurse and he loves her, but he’s not really “in love” with her, and he hasn’t been for a while. Ben is in his late 30s, he’s married, he has three children, he works as a buyer for some company–he deals with vendors and is pretty good at it, and that’s all we get to know about his work. Magary either hates New Wave or has never heard of it. So I am going to put off the moment when I find out that Mr. That having been said, this is, in my opinion, a contemporary work of New Wave fiction and more than that, it’s a beautiful example of what I love about New Wave. I have my observations about this book as a work of fiction and if I read what the author has to say about it I will probably find out I am dead wrong. I am deliberately not reading anything about the author or any of his social media posts (if he even has any) because I want to be able to talk about this book in a vacuum. Today I put it on again, just to see if it was as good as I remembered it, and yes, it really holds up. I listened to it shortly after I got it, and I was favorably impressed. I picked up Drew Magary’s novel The Hike on audiobook a while back because it was the Audible deal of the day and the concept sounded interesting.
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