Books like The Full Ridiculous

I’m sure I’ve never laughed out loud so many times while reading a book that explores the effects of deep trauma.

What I love here is that we barely know the extent of Eleanor’s childhood trauma until the very end. What we experience instead is the increasingly interesting life of someone who doesn’t at all fit into the social world as we know it but is about as endearing in her innocence and brute honesty as they come.

The way Eleanor Oliphant sees the world made me appreciate how ridiculous so many of our social rituals can be. I rooted for her every step of the way and came away almost wishing I could wear her particular goggles when walking through my own life.

To my knowledge, no one has written a main character like Don Tilman before. A tall, handsome genetics professor who’s never had a second date, he approaches his need for a wife with typical precision and the use of a complex spreadsheet. Don navigates the unfamiliar world of feelings and unplanned activities with his customary efficiency, but what is this strange new emotion he’s feeling?

I simply adore this book and often read it twice a year. It’s an absolute delight, funny, poignant, and so incredibly life-affirming. You’ll be cheering Don and Rosie on and hoping that everything works out for them. I do every time, and I know what happens!

I loved this book for its characters, especially Norman. Only a twelve-year-old boy, Norman has suffered the loss of his one true friend and now forms brave new plans: to find his birth father and to perform as a stand-up comedian at Edinburgh’s Fringe Festival. He is helped by his mother, her older colleague, and others he meets on the road trip to Scotland. Norman has terrible skin psoriasis, a fetish for cheese on toast, and vast quantities of courage and determination.

Some wisdom from Norman: "Never give up. Because no matter if everything goes to hell in a hand basket and you lose your father, your footy career, your baby, your memory, your son, your breath or your best friend, you’ve just got to keep on going."

This novel is elegantly written and emotionally authentic, and while it is a light and zippy read, the more you think about it, the more it seems to say. 

It is about a week in the life of Melbourne man Simon Larsen. Things are not going very well for Simon. He was a successful architect but during lockdown his business failed and his beautiful home had to be sold. Now Simon has moved his family to a tiny flat, and he is unemployed, broke, and can hardly get off the sofa. 

While Simon seems hopeless, the family he has married into are formidable, from his beautiful wife Tansy to his terrifying mother-in-law Gloria. I loved the Schnabels but still, I’m not sure I would want to be related.

This starts with such a great premise: Douglas Petersen, a devoted but socially awkward biochemist, is blindsided when his wife announces she might leave him, but first, they’ll go on a "Grand Tour of Europe" with their 17-year-old son.

Douglas hopes this is his chance to fix the marriage, connect with his son, and rediscover the man he was supposed to be. But as the trip goes on, we start to realise that so often our vision of how life should be is based on fear of change and habit.

I was captivated by Julian Barnes’ treatment of memory and time in this novel, which tells the story of Tony Webster and his group of school friends, whose relationships fracture and strain as life and death leave their marks on their lives. In his retirement, Webster's own memories of his youth prove unreliable.

I felt it was a well-paced and exquisitely written short novel, which makes impressive use of subtle imagery (the sight of the Severn bore is a good example–a nod to how the world can sometimes surprise us). He uses these subtly constructed visual reference points to illustrate this greater message on the relationship between time and memory.

As a piece of writing, I found it quite simply extraordinary.

Shiva Naipaul is a truly major Caribbean writer. He captures the volatile essence of that extremely unstable society. One added bonus is his inter-racial perspective, to which his Indian origins contributes decisively. This work ‘views a colonial world sharply with postcolonial perspectives.’ Any reader of West Indies fiction should combine a sense of history with some grasp of contemporary conditions. Although the novel was written in the 1960s, it still has a sense of contemporary relevance. Obviously, readers must keep their eyes open for younger writers in this mode. Naipaul’s works have rightly been integrated into the Educational System.      

I like a good satire and I love Ian McEwan. Set in academia, Professor Beard, with his Nobel prize in physics clutched to his chest, is offended by the idea that art might be as good a tool for curing a sick planet as his analytical facts. For all his scientific knowledge, he fails to understand that art has power. His younger colleague tries his best, explaining how images created by art bypass the modern cerebral cortex and go straight to our ancient limbic brain which controls memory and emotion, the part of the brain where we process value judgments, judgments that exert a strong influence on our behavior. This book makes the case for climate change as an important subject in literature, art, and music, because we need to touch hearts before we can create change. And it’s pretty funny on top of it.

Westlake is one of my favorite authors. His best-known works are his humorous John Dortmunder crime capers, but this book is a freestanding work with a brilliance all its own. Imagine an ordinary businessman sacked in corporate downsizing and desperate to land a new job…so desperate that he’ll literally kill the competition to get it.

I found it impossible to put down as I followed Burke Devore, someone not truly a “bad guy,” plan, prepare for, and carry out murder after murder. But what dazzled me most was how Westlake morphed a chilling crime spree into a grand metaphor for survival in the world of business.

Mickelson’s Ghosts was the final book of famous novelist and equally famous writing teacher John Gardner, published a few months before his death in a motorcycle accident at the too-young age of 49. It tells the story of Peter Mickelson, a once-famous philosopher nearing the end of his career, and finding himself buying a run-down house he can't afford with his ex-wife and the I.R.S. breathing down his neck. Soon the rationalist philosopher finds himself living in a world of bad decisions, sex, hauntings and ghosts, and religious cults—a world where rationalism can’t save him from his own creeping madness and mortality.