I have got to say - really, I absolutely MUST SAY - that I loved this book. Loved, loved, loved it.
Reading Brand New Human Being is kind of like watching a supermodel slip and fall on the runway, knocking out one of her teeth. You are filled with a mixture of horror, gratitude that it isn’t you, and a wee tad of schadenfreude, because, let’s face it, who doesn’t like seeing other people miserable? So long as it isn’t you, right?
Or maybe that’s just me.
Here we have Logan August Pyle, whose father, Gus, died four months earlier, leaving behind a young widow( Bennie, only four years older than Logan) who got all of Gus’s cash and the lake cabin. Logan was left with his boyhood home, a tract of land that other people want and are willing to pay for but which yields no monetary satisfaction for Logan, only a sense that he’s safeguarding his father’s legacy. Oh, and a watch he can’t find - Logan was left that, too.
Logan’s wife, Julie, works for a law firm, and by works, I mean she WORKS. All the time. She’s rarely home, and when she is, she is focused nearly solely on her and Logan’s four-year-old son, Owen. Logan, meanwhile, was supposed to complete his dissertation and become a doctor of literature, but with Julie’s pregnancy and the death of his father, well, you know how these things happen. They don’thappen - that’s what happens.
The real problem for Logan is that he is fast becoming a spectator in his own life.