Book description
“Charlie P is energetic, delightfully sardonic, dark without being oppressive, playful and very readable.”—Sven Birkerts
In Charlie P, New York author Richard Kalich offers us a singularly unique, comic, and outlandish everyman. Akin to other great American icons such as Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt and Ring Lardner’s Al, Charlie P plumbs…
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Why read it?
1 author picked Charlie P as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
Constructed nonlinearly, this funny, playful, and complex novel concerns our culture’s pressure on men to “be” something; it’s also about the human sense of self in general. It has no conventional plot, though Kalich has created a perfectly workable structure: a kind of index that builds in intensity. Without giving particulars as to geography, age, family, or employment, the paragraph-length descriptions of Charlie P reveal him as hyperbolically great or defeated. Charlie P has accomplished both everything and nothing.
The character is an iconographic blank, perhaps an engineer or former bitcoin-seeker who, for all his striving, suffers an inability to…
From Stacey's list on The best fiction that writes against narrative convention.
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