Anxious People: A Novel

Made me not want to read anymore by that author. Slow and annoying.

It’s difficult to describe this book and to do it justice - it’s funny, touching and intelligent with characters that are well-formed throughout the course of the book. The writing style is jarring at first because it it doesn’t read like a standard novel. Instead, it’s a stream of consciousness - reading it feels like reading each of the characters’ diaries. The story follows a failed bank robber who unintentionally takes a number of people hostage during an open house. What follows is an examination of relationships, love, depression and anxiety.

A comedic commentary on how we really think and communicate. A jigsaw puzzle, but with pieces of creative writing serendipitously weaving together snatches of character information. The twists and turns are so cleverly disguised with the various narration approaches from the beginning. The character tangents actually make perfect sense, leaving the reader in a baffled state of questioning their own assumptions in life. A rollercoaster of emotions delivered in a light and quick read that is actually filled with all manner of life lessons and experiences. I managed to be fooled more than once in my assumptions while reading this book. At one point, I found myself flipping back through pages in the beginning, looking for evidence that I (the reader) was right and that the writer was the one who was wrong. But no, just masterful writing and a bewildered realisation that I was guilty of blindly assuming a major detail! A story about perception and assumption. The majority of us manage to live significant (if not all) stretches of our lives based on our very own perceptions and assumptions of what we witness or experience throughout our lives. In time, these perceptions and assumptions form into our truths and our beliefs. Then when something undeniably alters that truth or belief, we are shocked and find ourselves questioning our reality, our livelihood. It can be unnerving and confrontational when we realise that we may have been complacent or even wrong from the beginning. All because we may have made an assumption, based upon our perception at the time, which we allowed to grow and form into something stronger. The author has a masterful way of opening the readers eyes to multiple sides of a story, when in life we often only allow ourselves the headspace for one or two sides. Often we feel we need to pick a side, make a decision, have an opinion, when we haven't even bothered to consider other perceptions of a situation. We form our opinions on our assumptions...

The characters did not resonate with me and the plot was a bit slow.

This book is awful. The narrator brazenly says ‘this is a story about idiots’ and that is true. The characters are absentminded. It reads like a pretentious drunk person telling a story at a party. There is no point to the read. If you’re into more meta, existential things, this mightttt be for you. Not for me. I would have stopped after the first 30 pages, but I picked this for book club and had to push them. Don’t make the same mistake I did.