Force of Gravity

Records the obsessive details of one man's decline into insanity, in a novel that questions the tenuous hold all of us claim on reality and upon our very lives

First novelist Jones is also the marketing manager at HarperCollins, so he has two major houses rooting for him (See Talk of the Trade, Mar. 1), as well as a strong blurb from no less than Iris Murdoch. He's well worth the attention. His book is the story of Emmet (no other name), a hapless creature who has never recovered from a rootless childhood and a mother who leaped to her death before his eyes. He constructs weird patterns of behavior and mountains of lies to protect himself from a world he finds inherently hostile. Novels told entirely from the point of view of people on the edge of sanity can be trying, but Jones's crisp, observant writing, his often mordantly hilarious scenes and his dead-on dialogue carry the reader on a wild, oddly compelling ride. Emmet tries to live on carrots alone, compiles endless diary entries, goes shopping (disastrously), adopts an appalling stray cat to befriend his unhappy dog, is robbed, tries to maintain contact with his elusive brother Jonathan and is finally committed, ever apologetic, to an asylum. Jones draws wonderful portraits of some maddening but profoundly human crazies, one of whom eventually escapes with Emmet. It is a tribute to the skill and sympathy with which Jones has evoked Emmet's pathetic life that the reader comes to care so deeply about his survival and recovery. An astonishing debut.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A disappointing first novel that traces a young man's gradual breakdown following his mother's death: The author's deadpan prose keeps the action at such a distance from the reader that it's difficult to develop any feeling--much less sympathy- -for the protagonist. Emmet, a photographer's assistant, lives with his dog in a dilapidated house in New York. An insomniac and recluse, he subsists on raw carrots and soda water and spends his free hours roaming through the forgotten neighborhoods of the city, obsessively searching for violations of the municipal code (which he has memorized). By the time we learn the real reason behind Emmet's collapse (i.e., witnessing his mother's suicide), he has entered a mental institution, where he makes common cause with Louise, self-destructive and even more disturbed than himself. They escape together, but Louise's instability puts her (seemingly) beyond Emmet's reach and gives an ambiguous tone to the story's end. There are flashbacks and recollections throughout--of Emmet's childhood, his grandfather's death at sea, his mother's widowhood and discontent--but these unfold a lament rather than a mystery, a chronicle whose outline is apparent at the onset and receives shading, though not shape, as the narrative progresses. When Emmet, at the end of the story, assumes the burden of caring for Louise, we are meant to see in this the start of his recovery, but--given the extent of Louise's psychoses--it could just as easily be read as another of his delusions. The author's implication that Emmet has regained his balance is not borne out in his description of Emmet's thoughts and actions, and this weakens what is obviously intended as a hopeful ending. A good story badly told: the narrator is aloof and seemingly too afraid of Emmet's madness to enter very deeply into his world. Unconvincing. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.