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    YOU comma Idiot
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    YOU comma Idiot
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    YOU comma Idiot
    Ebook378 pages5 hours

    YOU comma Idiot

    By Doug Harris

    3.5/5

    ()

    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this ebook

    Winner, Quiddity Award for Best Book Trailer

    Shortlisted, Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and QWF First Book Prize

    You're the kind of guy who falls in love after one date. Marginalized and alienated, perennial fuck-up Lee Goodstone is a resounding zero: a low-rent hash-dealer with delusions of inadequacy. He's content to while away the hours of his life drinking, smoking, hanging out, playing the occasional game of hockey, and generally ignoring the world outside his tiny neighbourhood.

    But Lee's near-idyllic existence is about to grind into second gear. His friend Henry has been accused of kidnapping and Lee's been cornered by the local media. Another friend has decided to shoehorn his way into Lee's drug business. And he's just made it with his best friend's girlfriend. Clearly, Lee needs a Plan B -- not easy for a guy who long ago decided that the correct plan of action is to have no plan at all.

    A hip, comedic novel, Doug Harris's YOU comma Idiot is a dark, demented, deeply delightful excursion into youthful alienation and ennui.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGoose Lane Editions
    Release dateNov 22, 2010
    ISBN9780864926951
    Unavailable
    YOU comma Idiot
    Author

    Doug Harris

    In his teens, Doug Harris unloaded watermelon trucks from Florida and disposed of corpses at an animal hospital. Then, in his twenties, he got through film school by working night shifts as a hospital orderly — once again transporting dead bodies. Though it was hard to leave the cadavers behind, at 24 Doug co-wrote and directed the feature film Remembering Mel, a quirky, ambitious comedy that was screened in Canada, Great Britain, and Germany. Today he runs an award-winning video production company.

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    Reviews for YOU comma Idiot

    3.5/5

    22 ratings7 reviews

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    • 1/5
      The jacket describes this book as "an ... excursion into youthful alienation and ennui", which I suppose is appropriate, because "ennui" is the overwhelming feeling I experienced whilst trying to read this book. Perhaps it's deep on levels that I cannot fathom, like the existentialists - after all, I thought that the Myth of Sisyphus was about man's futile search for a decent lunch spot in the face of an unintelligible world devoid of God and eternal truths or values, so I have a history of missing the point. For me, the chief failing of this book, while well written (in that the narrative appeared to flow, and the characters were reasonably well developed) was that I simply didn't *care* enough about the characters to feel the dramatic tension that the author was going for, nor, unfortunately, did I care enough about the characters to care what happened to them. Harris did such a good job setting up the alienation and ennui of his characters, that he alienated me right out of the book.
    • 4/5
      This was a fun romp though the streets of Montreal with the main character, Lee Goodstone. Nice ironic name for a small time drug dealer, who at the age of twenty-nine, still has no real job. The best thing going on in Lee's life right now is that he is having an affair with his best friend's girlfriend.The story is gritty (language and drug use) but the most interesting thing about the book is the narrative. I haven't read a lot or even any books written in the second person. It's quirky, and it was unique enough to keep me interested as the story rambled around town. Lee is dealing with some problems, and his gang of friends are all loser slackers for the most part, still living the party as they all are ending their twenties. There are some mysteries to be solved and relationships to be revealed, and that also keeps the pages turning: Henry, his friend, is suspected of killing a local missing girl. Henry denies it, but was he involved?If you act stupidly long enough, people come to think of you as stupid. And if you behave weirdly for long enough, they think of you as weird. And that's how you end up a stupid f*ing weirdo. That's how it works. People don't set out to be losers. It happens when you're not paying close enough attention. p36Some other neat touches, beside the narrative perspective, was the design. The cover has a cigarette burn in the Idiot and the inside leaf is covered with doodles that Lee would have written. The publisher sent a bookmark with it as well. These extra touches added to my reading enjoyment.
    • 4/5
      This book was a surprising revelation. While the topic was at first a little unappealing, I did start to care for the characters, their complexity, their evolution, the array of emotion subtly stated but undeniable. Each grows in his own way or becomes reaffirmed in his strength. The ending is gently hopeful, without being moralistic nor unduly optimistic. I did not care for the second person singular, however. I found it created an unbridgeable distance, a gimmick that the story really did not need. The descriptions and atmosphere of Montreal are perfect, the relationships true and the plot creative but simple. A definite discovery.
    • 4/5
      I approached this book with trepidation since I haven’t read anything in the second person since the ‘Choose your own Adventures’ series from my teaching days. Yet very quickly the writing style became comfortable, almost like Lee’s conscience retelling his exploits. There is at first nothing sympathetic about Lee, a dope-dealing self-proclaimed loser living in a Montreal dump with walls made of beer cases (although all the bottles are washed and the cases are not tattered), and his collection of friends. He covets his best friend’s girl, smokes drinks swears fights when he must, babysits(!) when he must (but you know there is something special here), and somehow I came to be on his cheering squad. The descriptions are right-on witty, leading to many ‘wish I’d said that’ moments. Yes, I’m an old school marm, (open minded, though), and yes, I liked it.
    • 4/5
      Lee Goodstone is a part-time drug dealer with no job. He's dating his best friend's girlfriend. He's been linked to the disappearance of a young woman. And in spite of all that, I liked him. I liked him because he is starting to realize that he has to make some changes and start making better choices. And because he is witty and a bit cynical. You Comma Idiot is a novel about taking responsibility; it's about loyalty and friendship. Author Doug Harris has brought these conventional themes to life with a highly unconventional main character, and the unusual use of the second person point of view. I think using that point of view was masterful as it helped me identify with somone I have virtually nothing in common with. This is a fast-paced book, with lots of dialogue and short chapters. The dialogue is great and all the characters rang true, with Lee being an especially strong and consistent voice. The story is enticing and plausible -- this reads like real life -- and I found myself eager to know how it all worked out. Well done! p.s. A real accomplishment: my teenaged son is reading it and he hasn't read a book that wasn't "required" since I don't know when!
    • 5/5
      I will admit that the first few pages were difficult. 2nd person point of view is a bit jarring. Fortunately, though, this style doesn't dominate the story after the first few pages. It is like chick lit for men. (Man-lit?). In it, we get a look at a young man's mostly dysfunctional life as he realizes that life can't always be a free ride, and that growing up requires choices that have repercussions. And, even though his lifestyle, choices and temptations might be different from the average reader's, the story was believable and the main character's decisions made great sense in the context of his life. The book covers some activities that are generally frowned upon, but there is no moralizing on the subject, which is nice.I was more than pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed the story, and how much I wanted things to work out okay in the end. And I have to admit that I really enjoyed how the main character was humorously snide. The conversations were realistic, the situations dreadful but handled with humor and the characters flawed, but what humans aren't?And, by the way, I really liked the dust jacket and inside cover "embellishments".
    • 3/5
      Received. Looks funny.Is funny. One funny cool thing is that the publicity person responsible for sending out review copies is already a person whose judgment I trust in choosing the funny: Corey Redekopp, writer of Shelf Monkey, one of my all-time favourite book-books.This book manages to be funny and Canadian-local, without being parochial and I'm-Canadian-look-at-me. It reminds me of the experience of reading Chabon - I feel an absolute homegrown sense of the accurate ear of the writer. I am not a Montreal small-time drug-dealer/loser (shocker, I know, right?) but as a Canadian adult I find the characters and dialogue totally believable.I also really love the take on the narrative voice. I seem to mention that a lot in my reviews. It must be hard for a writer to come up with (and therefore hard for a reader to run into) a fresh style of narrative voice. There are already a lot of good books in the world, after all. Although the device chosen by Harris has been used before (rarely), this is one great new version. It is...well...I guess it has to be called an interior monologue. Harold Bloom (one of my reading heroes) cites Hamlet as the first character given an interior monologue, and it is the paradigm. Hamlet wonders aloud, abstractly.."Is it...?" Harris has his character Lee address himself as "you". as in "You are running down the street..." The reader is not watching the character talk to himself - the reader is inside the conversation, he is an interlocutor with himself, the character. Cool.I have no way of judging if little Canadian books become successful and I don't have much time to devote to checking whether they receive good critical notices. However, I can rave here on LibraryThing, and as The Nervous Marigold on my blog. I can tell my reading buddies, and I can lend my copy around to the worthy.This is a super book, and it is satisfying to know that there are new Canadian writers that are outside the canon (for now), outside the political-book complex, just writing good books that READERS ENJOY!I wonder if it would be overstating it to mention the indecisive loser-ishness of Hamlet being a germane reference in You Comma Idiot, or if that is perhaps reaching a bit too far?