A Literary Review

The Way Things Are is a master work of life-affirming fiction. It is a novel that reveals elements of humanity which have many times been considered but never with these words in this particular order. So in that way, it is mostly unique. It is an experience which is both familiar and new, mundane and exciting, worthless and profound. Over the course of 600 pages we are exposed to a world much like ours featuring made up characters who do things that we would also sometimes do but in a more interesting way. A car crash does not lead to a simple court settlement, but a whirlwind romance and pages of lying and backstabbing. The people in this novel are simply incapable of making intelligent decisions, and you'll love them all the more for it!

The never-ending stream of words will pull you deeper into chaotic events all of which leads to a final culminating scene, that I must say, was a great pay off, especially when considering how long it took me to read those six hundred pages as the typeface is quite small and the writing quite dense. After all, it's only Monday and I still have two dozen more books to read and review. I barely even get to see my kids with all these blasted books that come out every week! Must everyone be a writer!?

But rest assured, the writer in question has put their talents on display in a way that promises us a fulfilling career lined with similarly themed, slightly less successful novels, each filled with equally improbable, word-spewing characters who pontificate on life and strain to explain what it means to be human. (Not spending my time reading these books would be my guess.) So if you read one novel this year, make sure it is this novel, and also be sure to read the novel we'll be reviewing next week, The Way Things Were, and the one next week, and the one after that; for they are all very important, mostly entertaining, and filled with people who are like us but somehow more stupid.