A Calling for Charlie Barnes
Why, in fiction, do women have the corner on: being neurotic, desperately seeking one’s purpose, and/or flirtations with malaise? Carol Shields upended that narrative with Larry’s Party, and Joshua Ferris has done it also with A Calling for Charlie Barnes.
Charlie Barnes thinks he has pancreatic cancer. Maybe. That’s what the internet is telling him. So he calls everyone he knows. Cue Charlie’s attempts at making sense of his life — his multiple marriages, his “grass is always greener/I’ve got a genius idea” job hopping, and his long-suffering children (one of whom, we find out, is narrating — er, writing? — the book). You know, his “calling.”
This is like the ultimate A Lifely Read book, meaning this: “He hated fiction when it was confined to a book, but out here, in real life, his fictions got him out of bed most mornings, and to take them away was to dim life, remove its color, silence its invigorating and melancholy score.” And this: “Real life makes for good novels because it’s lived as a bunch of lies, and because fictions of one kind or another are the only things worth living for.”
There’s some metafiction going on here, and it’s brilliant, clever, and full of heart. (A Calling for Charlie Barnes is one of the NYT’s Notable Books of the Year, btw.)
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