Strange Skies

I loved Paul Mauro, the main character in this book. I thought the premise was so dark (a guy who fakes having cancer to avoid having kids), but I ended up laughing against my will. This is one of those rare books that tackles the most uncomfortable subjects (cancer, infidelity) and somehow manages to be incredibly entertaining at the same time. It's a hard act to pull off, but Marinovich succeeds.

Well-behaved characters are boring. Fortunately, Paul, the hero of Strange Skies, the exquisite novel by Matt Marinovich, is not a well-behaved characters. He's complex and dark, and like the most fascinating characters in literature, he allows us to face our own darkness and complexity. A fabulous debut! I highly recommend it.

Hats off to Marinovich for this gutsy debut novel. It has been a long time since I have read something this fresh. Marinovich's effortless ability to weave his character Paul through a series of wickedly hilarious and truly tender moments is unpretentious and skillful. His use of language is brilliant; "some man in a tan trenchcoat is standing over his squatting golden retriever, balanced on all four legs like some canine lunar module." This novel is talent, stripped down and confident.

best novel by someone not dead, that is. I like to read contemporary novels, but most just suck! this one doesn't. The character, Paul, is smart and hilarious, the action is dark, fast and funny without being overwrought or symbolically laden. I like that the novel doesn't try to teach us a "lesson," and I LOVE that it's not about 9/11. If Marinovich's characters were having a chat with the couple in "On Chesil Beach," they would say, "just ----, Jesus Christ, what's wrong with you? You're taking up too many pages with your ersatz fifties dialogue!" then they would steal their wallets. Right from the get go this novel is about deception, human nature, soul-searching, lust and adventure. Marinovich must be a slippery pony to have dreamed up and written this elegant novel. But he's probably smart, too.

Paul Mauro is the kind of character, and person, if you're unlikely to meet someone like him, it's easy to hate. Fun, almost. He starts off garnering a bit of sympathy for possibly having cancer, and we can even understand his impulse to pretend that he does. But his blatant selfishness knows no bounds as he has an affair with a woman he meets at the doctor's office, allowng her to buy him expensive clothes while mostly ignoring his wife, Lee. He winds up leaving her and traipsing off on an adventure that can only be described as adolescent. Cancer is omnipresent, both the fake kind and the real thing, as Paul encounters other people, like the child Jack, who he should empathize with, but doesn't. He puts up so many walls between himself and everyone else that at the point we should feel sympathy for him, we really don't, yet still want to see how he'll pull off his next trick. The sequence with football star Demetrius Davenport is like a hallucination, and while he's also easy to hate, somehow I could just smirk him off. Paul, on the other hand, wants our sympathy, wants everyone's sympathy, even long past the point where he deserves it. Barb and Jack wind up giving him second chances, as does his brother, but one gets the sense that he's been so intent on living out his fantasy life that he can't readjust to the reality he must ultimately face. Marinovich's writing is maudlin and funny, outrageous yet endearing, with death lurking in the background even as Paul attempts to truly get the most out of life, making up for any moment he's played it safe until now. Friends and lovers come and go, floating in and out of his life with hardly a blink of his eye until he meets the mother and child team of Barb and Jack. Paul's despisal of children (his baby nephew "glares at me greedily with his glittering blue eyes, his damp brown hair swept to one side, Hitler-style.") marks him as perhaps not ready for the grownup life he's signed up for by marrying Lee. Hitler also gets a shout-out later in the novel, when Paul needs "someone truly evil to distract me," and reaches for one of his books in the vicinity of a Hasidic woman in Park Slope. Marinovich makes his reversal one we can all relate to on some level; who, after all, hasn't wanted to chuck their old life in favor for a new, devil-may-care nonstop round of hedonism? Paul's recklessness is contrasted with his father's promiscuity and his brother's by-the-numbers life. "Sure, in the old days, I used to save room. I saved room for sex, for food, for relaxation. I became a mansion of saved rooms Now, I gorge on everything." is how he puts it. Marinovich excels at painting Paul's juvenilia as well as the way his cancer diagnosis affects those around him, garnering him instant sympathy and carte blanche to be as big of an a--hole as he wants to be. To Paul's credit, and Marinovich's, he doesn't try to lie to the reader about his motives. While we may not trust him, even when he's actually changed, we c