Well

A cast of characters primarily from the working class of a Seattle suburb grapples with dark compulsions and painful emotions in their search for sex, drugs, violence, symbols of their faith, and local sports championships. A first novel.

"I think something inside of her broke, whatever that string is that holds people together, it snapped." "That string" is the leitmotif of this unusual, dark debut novel with an ensemble cast. McIntosh assembles different episodes and voices to create an impressionistic tableau of Federal Way, Washington, a blue-collar town facing the loss of blue-collar jobs and culture. McIntosh's characters are introduced in first-person testimonies and third-person sketches that build matter-of-factly and then trail off ambiguously, like entries in a police blotter-if the police blotter were written by Samuel Beckett. They lead lives of quiet despair, punctuated by bursts of violence, benders and bad sex. Physical pain harries many of the characters, madness others, and almost all are cursed with deteriorating personal relationships. Among the most moving episodes is a long chapter, "Fishboy," narrated by Will, a student at a small college in Nebraska who is studying fisheries. The story flashes back to his dangerous obsession with a classmate, Emily Swanson, and his father leaving his mother. Another beautifully executed sequence, "Border," shows how the suicide of an ex-boxer, Jim, is viewed by his sister-in-law, his brother, his buddies, a former opponent and his mother's friends. The sustained glide from voice to voice is virtuosic, and the writing is dogged-it never gets literary; it digs through the clich‚s and the usual inarticulateness of the stories people tell in bars and grocery store lines; and it stumbles on diamonds in the rough everywhere. McIntosh is only 26, but he is already an artful registrar of the heart's lower frequencies.
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Although it bills itself as a novel, McIntosh's first book is more a collection of anecdotes and character sketches connected by a place (the Seattle suburb of Federal Way) and the miserable and pitiful lives of the characters. McIntosh introduces us to people we'd perhaps rather not know: a bartender who believes himself incapable of love, people who care more about whether the Sonics make the playoffs than they do about the women in their lives, and a punch-drunk boxer who can't stop fighting even when he stops believing he can win. In each life, desire (for drugs or money or sex or most anything) inevitably leads to aching disappointment. McIntosh's straightforward but subtly clever writing renders these miseries in a light too harsh for the reader to ignore, and what might otherwise be maudlin and overwrought instead comes across as an awfully accurate portrayal of dissatisfaction. Although the book never fully comes together as a cohesive narrative, the slowly mounting isolation and hopelessness of the characters makes for powerful, painful reading. John Green
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