Red the Fiend

With a very rare and unique style, the novel is construed as a collection of short stories about the same character, a small boy named "Red" whose life is destroyed every single day by a sadistic grandmother and the conditions in which he lives, where no redeeming situations will ever take place. Red is placed at the center of everything that is arbitrary and destructive in a person's life, where no matter what you do, or where you go, everything is a struggle and cruelty is omnipresent. The writing is fantastic, but most probably every reader will hate the book as its makes you crawl into Red's skin and suffer with him during its 213 pages and at the end you will ask yourself what is the purpose of enduring such torment.

This novel definitely destroys the sappy Waltons-style familial myths that dominate so many books and movies about the Depression. Sorrentino captures the self-destructiveness of his novel's unhappy, uneducated, unloved characters quite well, a self-destructiveness stemming from their quite brutal environment. I liked Sorrentino's use of two formal methods--via his omniscient third-person narrator--to report on his characters' grim mental states: his eschewal of direct quotes, instead using only paraphrases (e.g., "Grandma said that...") to capture the characters' loss of individuality; and his narrator's frequent reporting of the characters' thoughts stream-of-consciousness style. However, Sorrentino's vivid and masterful writing style doesn't quite conceal the novel's near-total lack of positive character development. Red, Grandma, and most of the other characters begin the novel screwed-up and merely become progressively worse, with no epiphanies. Of course, why should epiphanies occur to characters who have been too busy surviving day-to-day to develop even rudimentary senses of self-awareness?) In short, anyone who wants to know, in often graphic and brutal detail, how a dysfunctional childhood can actually damage a child should read this novel.