The Pharmacist's Mate

Rating:
Summary: Enough decorative writing!
Review: Please, oh please, oh please, young postmodern writers of today, stop using gimmicks! Just write! Amy Fusselman shows here that she has an ability to be touching and thoughtful, but apparently she doesn't feel that's enough. It's not that I object to references to the everyday, but the goldfish, the AC/DC, the calling up the ultrasound company schtick, it just seems so tired and overdone. Douglas Coupland was cloying even back with Generation X, and here it's the same thing more than a decade later. McSweeney-type writers seem so nervous about sounding earnest that they thwart their own voices, which might otherwise be strong and affecting. It's like second-rate Don DeLillo. Please, oh please, oh please, just write good stories with strong characters who navigate contemporary society without having to make a Seinfeld-like quip about everything.

Rating:
Summary: This is what all the Fusselman's about:
Review: The Pharmacist's Mate is a gentle book full of perfect things. The topics seem familiar, but they never feel tired. The three main roads of the plot - the author's attempts to become pregnant, her father's journal as a merchant marine, and the author dealing with her father's death - are laced together like one of those old Ivy-League footballs from when helmets were soft. It's a great thing, this little book, maintaining the shining quality of McSweeney's publishing. Read it, read it.

Rating:
Summary: an unedited disappointment
Review: This book is not without its strengths. The selections from the author's father's journal are interesting. And I do not discount the personal experiences described, either the father's death, or the author's fertility treatments. The problem is that, as written, there is only enough real material for a long magazine article. The rest consists largely of references to what the author is eating, wearing, or listening to on the radio. It is difficult to imagine what, if anything, has been excised. In one excruciatingly cloying passage, the author repeatedly refers to herself in the third person as 'the possibly pregnant person.' I am an enthusiastic reader of McSweeney's, and wanted to like this, but could not. That said, Ms. Fusselman has a good grasp of language, and may have a better book ahead of her.