The Perfect Plan by Bryan Reardon

 

This is a pretty mediocre novel, really, but it's better than it seems it's going to be for the first hundred-ish pages, which are deeply muddled and kinda circular, and completely redolent with unreliable narration: specifically, the sort of unreliable narration where you know it's just that the narrator isn't telling you a thing that will make things make sense. Eventually the story stop spinning its wheels and kinda goes somewhere, but that somewhere is at best barely worth the opening slog. The prose here is kinda stolid and inert, there's not a lot of sense of who the characters are (which is a glaring weakness in a novel that aims at the sort/s of psychological conflicts and resolutions this one does) and the story makes remarkably little sense. The pacing tends toward a lot of pointless orbiting and repetition. I don't exactly resent my decision to finish the novel, but I wouldn't have regretted DNFing it, either.