Debbie's Reviews > Tin Man

Keep your scenery, give me the scoop!

Description! Too much description! A good part of the book is the main character wandering around the street, noticing things—well, noticing EVERYTHING. I don’t need to see the sun and the flowers and the roads and the light and the buildings. Every. Single. Thing. I really don’t. I guess you could say I’m not a visual person. I’m not one to soak up nature; I’d rather be sitting inside, letting my head, my family, a friend, a book, or a movie talk to me. So when I have a book that wants to make me stay outside (horror!!) and look at all the pretty things, I balk. Close the door and come inside, it’s boring out there. The outside world is in the way of the characters. I read to hear what people are saying and thinking, not ogle the landscape. If I wanted that, I’d be reading more poetry. So here we have a story of two people, but what I remember most is the discomfort of being outdoors and looking at plants and buildings. Sorry, I want the scoop, not the scenery. Life is too short to stop and smell the roses.

Okay. Deep sigh. Move it along, Debbie. Talk about the good things: Beauteous, just beauteous language, poetic and flow-y. Some of the sentences truly are magnificent and I did highlight a bunch of them. Also, there is terrific psychological insight into the dark emotions of longing, grief, loneliness, disappointment, and the intensity of one’s first love. And we get a good look inside two heads, both so intelligent, sensitive, real, vivid. There’s wisdom all over the place.

Standouts:
-The scene of Ellis’s mother standing in front of a Van Gogh painting.
-The description of heartbreak as “the sound of an exhausted swallow falling gently to earth.”
-The scenes of Michael visiting his dying lover in a hospital.

It’s telling that despite all this luscious stuff, I felt like the atmosphere was so oppressive, I had to give the book only 3 stars. What can I say? Can I help it if cilantro ruined an otherwise good meal?

Always a surprise when this happens: When I do the old peek-back-at-the book-you-just-read thing, I completely love the sentences. (The dish looks appetizing because I can’t taste the cilantro.) I forget that I had spent entirely too much time having to picture the surroundings. I guess that’s what it is. It’s tedious and boring work to have to focus on visualizing the setting, whereas it’s easy and fun to sit inside the characters’ heads and visualize their thoughts and feelings.

The story is about two men, one straight (Ellis) and one gay (Michael) who get involved when they are teens. Both guys are cool and interesting: Ellis sketches and Michael writes. Their close relationship is intense and nuanced. We don’t see love exactly, we just see depression and yearning and recollection, and lots of it. When they’re grown, Ellis marries Annie, who seems like a cool chick (though she doesn’t get enough airtime for me). Supposedly the three of them love each other, but how do we really know that when the writer only puts them together in a few brief scenes? I can’t get no satisfaction, all I want is some interaction.

The book starts like dynamite. We get a little story about Ellis’s mother, who has a special connection to a Van Gogh painting. Very intense, and it drew me in. From there we go into chapters from Ellis’s point of view. I didn’t realize how much the third-person narration was making me feel distant until I got to the next section, which Michael narrates. God was I happy that someone was talking in first person. That always makes the story seem closer, the characters more interesting and accessible. I thought oh goodie, now that Michael is talking, the writer will stop with all the description. For a brief while, it seemed like we were getting just talk and thoughts, not panoramas. But quickly Michael started describing his surroundings, and I started to get bored and annoyed again.

So as I said, because the landscape trumped the plot (including actions and dialogue), I wasn’t feeling the love. On top of that, the plot moved around and it was hard to figure out what time period we were in. A staccato “1994” as the chapter head just didn’t do it. Sometimes I like it when time periods are jumpy (like in The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox), but here, I got confused. Then I found myself not caring.

For those who like quotation marks, forget about it. There are none. Zero. That didn’t bother me, which might be surprising since I’m an ex-editor.

I feel weird not loving this like all of my friends did, but what can I say? Everyone’s taste is different. I wish I had liked it more, I really do, but for me it’s 3-star material, I can’t lie. In the end I was grateful it’s a short book so I could get out of there. Did I regret reading it? No. Will I read something else by this writer? Probably not.

Don’t listen to me and my lousy 3 stars. The world loved this book. I’m from outer space.