Wonderdog

Rating:
Summary: A Terrific Read!
Review: This book is terrific! Majors' people, places, and attitudes are far-reaching, extending beyond the confines of their Alabama borders. Although I was, at first, disengaged from the slacker protagonist Dev Degraw, I soon found a complex, interesting, and downright loveable soul hiding behind his devil-may-care facade. The first 30 pages or so were somewhat slow-going, but once the characters and plot are in place, the pace and humor are in the I-can't-go-to-bed-until-I-finish-this-chapter category. I highly recommend this book for its laugh-out-loud passages. The wit is first rate and the style of wry irony highly appealing for the fiction reader who also longs for that rariety: a thoughtful, sophisticated writing style, challenging vocabulary, and a surprise turn of events. If you enjoy Dave Eggers and Augusten Burroughs, this book showcases the best qualities of both writers--a treat you owe yourself! Sure to perk up the dreariest of winter blahs. Great professional reviews are also found at the Birmingham NPR website, the Seattle Times book review, the the Nashville Scene.



Rating:
Summary: Outrageously Funny
Review: This is an outrageously funny book. The lead character, Dev Degraw, is the grown up son of the long standing governor of Alabama, and he's able to get in all kinds of trouble, intended and unintended, including wiener dog attacks, butter eating contests, backwoods craps games, and a heated one-on-one putt-putt match for high stakes.

The book is not afraid to revel in Dev's masculinity with his faults and strengths. There is poignancy to the story which is subtly revealed, but the book's value to me is laughing along with, and frankly sometimes at, the antics of the reluctant winner, Dev Degraw.

A little racy for some, but I highly recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: A Wonder of a Dawg...
Review: This novel belongs in that fine class of novels about southern men of once excellent promise slipping through the seams of societal and patriarchal expectations. While reminding one of Binx Bolling in Walker Percy's "The Moviegoer," the titular character in Cormac McCarthy's "Suttree," and a host of Barry Hannah characters, the laconic, lazy, drunken, wiseassed Dev Degraw is still a unique and original character in his own right. "Wonderdog" manages to walk that most elusive tightrope between outright comedy and satire and a literary novel of manners, and it succeeds wonderfully. Majors' style is lyrical and laconical, stream of consciousness melded to the sardonic aside, as if a more lucid James Joyce had stumbled from Dublin to an SEC college town on a football weekend and ended up crashing a few frat parties. The son of the state's aging state governor, a Democrat who is losing his power base, Dev is too busy watching his own life fall apart to be much help to his father. Instead, he enjoys letting his law practice disintegrate day by day, haunting college bars at night, and badgering his band of Tuscaloosa brothers, a motley assortment including a Ph D candidate obsessed with sexualizing parentheticals, a butter-eating poet, and a barfly in denial of his sexualit, who roll through this novel like a sudden storm come up over the lowlands. Majors sends up the gadfly who can never leave college, state politics, the legal profession, and the very concept of celebrity. For those of you who only want fiction with scrubbed floors, neatened corners, and no loose ends, I'm sure that John Grisham or Tom Clancy or Genre Hack of Your Choice will have a new book out in the next few seconds. For those of us who see life as a spinning sphere of chaos, though, and who kind of like it that way, this is the novel for us.

Rating:
Summary: Priggish? not for you. Like to laugh? pick it up
Review: Who wrote this review? Oprah? Did the reviewer read the same book I
did? Sure, its not a book for your wife's book club, but "poignant"
chick-lit is pretty much covered out there. This book is one of the
funniest books I have ever read (in fact, my wife made me leave the room
any time I was reading it because she was getting irritated by my
constant horse laughs), and one of the bravest. The author apparently
felt no-need to shoe-horn in sentimentality, and the result is a raw,
real experience. Nonetheless it's a very well written novel, whose
rawness comes from its honesty and its point of view, not haphazard
writing.

The reviewer seams not to understand the difference between self-pitying
and self-mocking, the biggest difference being that self-mocking is a
lot funnier. And a lot of the action does take place in bars, but I
like bars - and so do a lot of other people, by the looks of things.

Read this book - there is nothing like it on the shelves of the
McBookstores out there, unfortunately. And that probably won't change
as long as the publishing world keeps printing safe books for safe
people.


Rating:
Summary: Done it again
Review: With "Wonderdog" Inman Majors has once again written a novel full of outrageous characters that will make you laugh aloud and ponder the workings of this wacky world. These characters and their antics will stay with you long after you've closed the book, and you'll never think of sweater vests or sticks of butter in the same way again. In particular, I enjoyed the voice of the narrator, a fast-talking, fast thinking wit whose humor comes fast and subtle, the sharp perceptions and wisdom catching you unawares and surprising you as good fiction should. The plot resists predictability and sentimentality, propelling you forward through a tumultuous week in the life of Dev DeGraw, on whom the crown of inherited fame rests precariously. I'm waiting for a sequel.