Review: What is this?
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 06 27, 2011
This short story is very confusing.I have no issue with unreliable narrators, but it is difficult to tell what is happening in this story because the writing is too poor for readers to be able to draw any conclusions.  Virtually everybody in the story has difficulty relating to others.  Conversations begin and then trail off without any important information being related.  The author doesn't prevent any "normal" interactions for us to be able to judge if the characters are the ones who have difficult understanding normal human interactions or if the problem actually is with him.  I had assumed that a main character was mentally unbalanced and waiting for that to develop throughout the story.  However, when the story ended, apparently he had become "normal," making a very unfulfilling conclusion.  Why set up a "weird" situation for a short story with all this foreshadowing and then leave it unexplored and unexplained?  The only way the author can advance the story is to tell us -- in simple sentences -- what type of people the characters are (things like:  He was a nice person.  He liked people.  He didn't know why, that was just the way he was).  We're never shown anything through the action of the story.  People are just put in situations, have weird, trailing-off conversations, and then we're subjected to basic statements about the type of people that they are.The environment isn't very realistic either.  Because of some odd wording, I thought at first that maybe the story was set in another country -- but then a character mentions being from "Michigan," which is the only sense of place we got in the story.  We know we're not in Michigan and we're in a city.  Don't hope for anything more specific.  It's a place where a independent office supply story is still in business (and can afford to pay ten dollars an hour for part time help) -- but is it in modern times?  Don't hope for anything specific, because it won't be happening.The characters seem not to know things that we would know.  For example, a character was in "the war" and has returned home and worked another type of job.  Later, "old bruises" on his face are thought by other characters to be from "the war."  However, human healing doesn't work that way and all humans should be aware of that.  Bruises, even "old" ones, have to be relatively recent and not from old trauma.The experience of reading this story is kind of like if another species was writing about humans and their interactions.  We know we don't act that way, but to a elephant, these interactions might make sense.The proofreading is better than some earlier reviews stated (I'm going to guess issues were corrected), but still not a professional job.