Byron Easy

September 30, 2013
This ambitious debut from an English musician turned writer is linguistically inventive and undeniably clever, but the novel, about a failed poet in the aftermath of a failed relationship, is overwrought and overwritten. The poet, Byron Easy, has never had it easy, but he has definitely hit bottom when the novel opens on Christmas Eve of 1999 in a London train station. He is returning to his mother and Leeds, much the worse for wear, "a penniless loser" and reeling from his disastrous marriage to Mandy. The journey through England gives Easy the chance to ruminate on the hellishness of contemporary life (which is to say: the hellishness of his own existence), and provides Cook a frame for Easy's backstory, from his dysfunctional family and childhood to the trials and tribulations of making it in London. But the bulk of the narrative is devoted to the agonies inflicted on him by Mandy, one of the most accomplished shrews in the history of literature. Mandy is unspeakably horrific: manipulative and petulant, cruel and abusive. It's hard to find any reason to like her, which makes it hard to feel much sympathy for the narrator, though Cook goes to great lengthsâtoo great, ultimately, both in terms of length and actionâto make Easy sympathetic. Cook is funny and perceptive, an over-the-top stylist with an immense vocabularyâbut he needs a more credible and engaging plot to put his obvious abilities to work.

October 15, 2013
A hip, hard-luck Londoner hops aboard a train and ponders how his life derailed. Cook's bulky, witty, but often maddening first novel opens with some high drama: It's Christmas Eve 1999, and the titular hero is very drunk and boarding a train heading to northern England, determined to kill himself once he reaches his destination. But that moment of reckoning is a long way coming: As the train moves forward, his mind casts back across his previous three decades on Earth to excavate the source of his self-hatred. Some of it has to do with his stepfather, who was an abusive horror to Byron and his mother (the depth of that is withheld till the tail-end of the book), his go-nowhere job in a music shop and a flagging nascent career as a poet. In his best moments, Cook describes these personal catastrophes with ready access to the wit and lovelorn-hipster tone that marks Nick Hornby's books, paired with Irvine Welsh's street-wise black humor. The novel's biggest problem, though, is Byron's biggest problem: Mandy, the woman with whom he's just ended a disastrous three-year marriage. She enters the book as the leader of an up-and-coming rock band. But her character eventually becomes a one-note harridan prone to violent rages that leave Byron bruised both emotionally and physically. Cook is wise to have his hero explore the intersection of abuses past and present, but Mandy is so simplistically hair-trigger that Byron's insights tend to read more like a litany of misogynistic complaints. It's easy to keep rooting for Byron by the time he reaches his destination, but it's been an exhausting, repetitive journey. Cook has smarts and observational talent to spare, but this novel needs characters nuanced enough to justify its length.

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October 15, 2013
Poet wannabe Byron Easy is on a train, leaving London to go home for Christmas in 1999. If only he wasn't seriously hungover and epically depressed. The end of the millennium has delivered the bitter demise of Byron's apocalyptic marriage to a fiendish woman trying to make it as a rock star. As the crammed-full train lurches forward, our nauseous antihero takes out his notebook and begins to record his jaundiced impressions and enumerate his shameful failures. It's a long, slow journey, and Byron, flat broke and unpublished at 30, hence poisoned by self-loathing, rage, and fear, is a wildly prolix narrator, given to gruesome detail, endlessly anatomized emotions, and increasingly horrific confessions, all tempered by mordant humor and shrewd intelligence. Musician and songwriter Cook's audaciously drawn-out first novel about the wreckage of a life sloshes with booze, puke, and piss. Yet it's also ravishing in its evocations of beauty, sexual candor, suspense, and unusual insights into the soul-battering consequences of abuse and violence. Ultimately, Cook's debut gathers force as a rolling and rocking ballad of survival and love.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)