You Poor Monster: or This Should Answer Your Questions, My Son - Hardcover

Kun, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1596921196 ISBN 13: 9781596921191

Publisher: MacAdam/Cage, 2005

Synopsis

A young Baltimore lawyer is thrown into an ugly divorce proceeding and finds himself befriending his client, the charming and generous Sam Shoogey. Shoogey is a former war hero, college football star, professional boxer and novelist. Or is he? As more and more of Shoogey's sweet and funny tales unravel, the narrator unexpectedly finds himself drawn even more to Shoogey, posing the question, "Is a lie a lie if you know it's untrue, or is it just a story?"

Kun again plays with the form and function of the English language to tell a captivating story in a new way with a combination of humor and tragedy. Readers themselves will become characters in the book when they are swept up in fantastical elements that make Kun’s characters so real.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Kun is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University and University of Virginia School of Law. His first novel, A Thousand Benjamins, was published to much acclaim in 1990. After a silence of thirteen years, he returned with his second novel, The Locklear Letters, which was a BookSense selection and was chosen by Amazon.com as a "Breakout Book" and My Wife and Dead Wife in 2004. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

Reviews

A Baltimore lawyer acquires an engaging but erratic raconteur for a client in Kun's funny, mazy third novel (after My Wife and My Dead Wife). When corporate lawyer Hamilton "Ham" Ashe takes on his neighbor Sam Shoogey's divorce case (against his better judgment), it's the beginning of a bizarre friendship. Shoogey is a liar extraordinaire—he regales Ham with stories of killing seven men during an unspecified war, sleeping with 150 women, writing lots of books, being a college football star and the like—and Ham finds him fascinating, even if Ham's wife (the "old grapefruit," Shoogey calls her) disapproves. The story of their improbable friendship lies at the heart of Kun's book—just who is Shoogey? And is anything he says true?—which delicately contrasts Ashe's very real family life and Shoogey's wild fantasy existence. While comedy sits on the surface of the narrative, a poignancy that borders on tragedy lies beneath in a novel that "tells the truth and lies in the same voice."
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This is a very cleverly constructed novel by a writer best known for his first book, A Thousand Benjamins (1990). Ham Ashe is a workaholic who becomes enamored of his new Baltimore neighbor, Sam Shoogey, a raconteur, author, and former war hero. Ham is a corporate lawyer, but Sam inveigles Ham into representing him in his nasty divorce. So starts a strange, sometimes surreal relationship as Ham watches Sam slowly slide into complete despair and dissolution. All of Sam's adventures, which he endlessly recounts, are soon cast into doubt as Ham discovers the truth about Sam's background and experiences. Meanwhile, Ham himself proves to be an unreliable narrator as his story of his happy marriage and solid relationship with his daughters is slowly but surely undermined by the bitter and cryptic endnotes. Kun wildly shifts the tone of his brainteaser of a novel from comic to pathetic to near tragic, and readers may have a hard time keeping up with him; but he also has some pointed things to say about outward appearances and the role of self-deception. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1596921196
• ISBN 13: 9781596921191
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 340