It Feels So Good When I Stop

June 1, 2009
Much like its unnamed narrator, Pernice’s first novel ambles in no discernable direction, nudging up against tantalizing stories but never quite connecting. In it, the narrator retreats to a Cape Cod cabin, owned by his sister’s ex-husband, after fleeing a days-old marriage. He then spends his time interacting with townsfolk; reminiscing about Jocelyn, his abandoned bride; babysitting his infant nephew; and assisting an alluring neighbor in coming to terms with her tragic past. The author, a noted musician, seeks to emphasize the ordinariness of his main character by leaving him anonymous, but the man is not ordinary at all—he is, in fact, pathologically aimless. He can never quite say why he left Jocelyn and has no idea what he hopes to accomplish in his exile; worse, there is no sense that he has any desire to find out. The main supporting characters, ex-brother-in-law James and neighbor Marie, are more compelling than the narrator, but of course their scenes are marred by the narrator’s necessary presence. Pernice’s easygoing prose is attractive, but the fetishizing of slackerdom is a make-or-break proposition.

June 15, 2009
Indie rock musician and poet Pernice (Meat Is Murder, 2003) applies his life experience to a funny, nimble novel about an average Joe trying to surmount his own nature.

The unnamed narrator is a UMass grad with a gift for words but little ambition. Lacking direction, he stumbles into a three-year gig working as a waiter in Amherst, where he encounters the great disaster of his life."When I met Jocelyn I knew within minutes I was going to either marry her or completely destroy my life," he confesses."It never occurred to me that both things could happen." While his protagonist flashes back often (and painfully) to this fiery affair, the author keeps his story stylishly grounded in the present day. By the time we catch up, the 25-year-old vagabond has become a struggling musician in Brooklyn, married Josie in a fever of passion and fled their doomed, drug-addled relationship the same day. Licking his wounds, he returns to Cape Cod, where he crashes with his recently abandoned brother-in-law James and two-year-old nephew Roy. Pernice's prose has much the same audacity as another musician-turned-writer, Jim Carroll. The narrator's profane, sharply honed observations resonate with self-deprecating humor, yet they also generate a surprising amount of empathy for this broken hero. As he reluctantly looks after Roy and launches a tenuous relationship with a local filmmaker, he has terrific flashes of self-awareness, discovering he's the proverbial man hitting himself with the hammer for the dumbest reason:"Because it feels so good when I stop."

An inspired, gutsy piece of work that promises more good things to come.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

August 15, 2009
Pernice has already established himself as a successful musician (The Pernice Brothers, The Scud Mountain Boys); as Nick Hornby has recently observed, "Now it turns out he can write fiction, too." And it's true: this novel is very good indeed. It compares to the nouveau coming-of-age stories exemplified by Adam Rapp's "The Year of Endless Sorrows" in which the protagonists, unlike the Holden Caulfields of yesteryear, are twentysomethings in the midst of that postcollege slump. The novel alternates between flashbacks of the narrator's pastin which he meets and dates his future wife, Jocelyn, just after graduating from UMassand presentin which he has just left Jocelyn before their honeymoon and is hiding out at his sister's place on Cape Cod, where he sometimes takes care of her boy, Roy. Soon he begins to rethink his marriage (despite a genuine friendship/small fling with a neighbor). VERDICT Funny, unself-consciously quirky, with touches of unironic sadness, this is for readers who enjoy coming-of-age tales.Stephen Morrow, Athens, OH

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2009
Pernices nameless narrator has fled to Cape Cod in the off-season to recover from his broken marriage. There he shoots the breeze with his former brother-in-law, James, never one to shy away from offering his unique take on things; babysits his winsome 18-month-old nephew, Roy; and helps an emotionally damaged neighbor, Marnie, make a documentary about the son she lost to accidental drowning. A veteran musician, Pernice ingeniously conveys his characters deepest feelings via conversations about musicMel Torm' leads to a dissection of marriage; Peter Frampton to an analysis of the Amherst music scene. A novel this formless will not be to everyones taste, and Pernice is almost perversely ambiguouswe never know, for example, exactly why his narrator has left his wife. Yet few comic novelists are as laugh-out-loud funny as Pernice, who seems to craft profane, hilarious dialogue and gross but entertaining anecdotes with the greatest of ease. Pernice is a cruder, ruder version of Nick Hornby, with a seemingly inexhaustible knowledge of obscure 1980s indie rock.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)