Review Detail

I’m sorry, but I tried to like DESTROY ALL CARS but could not. And I must first start out by saying that I did not finish the book. I stopped on page one hundred, nearly half of the novel. Now, the last one hundred and eighteen pages may be the strongest, but I felt I had given it WAY more than my usual twenty or so pages to get into a piece of fiction.

The novel’s main character, James Hoff, is an angry individual, who hates much about the world around him. And continues to bash things like his ex-girlfriend Sadie, consumerism, and himself for a hundred pages.

Told through journal entries, high school writing assignments, surveys from some type of girly magazine like SEVENTEEN, and conversation snippets, the storytelling is without a doubt unique. I just thought he ranted way too much. In fact, it was difficult to find anything likeable about this main character. My mother used to use a couple terms that would fit nicely on James, “Debbie Downer” and “Negative Nancy.” He just kept hitting the reader over the head with why the world sucks.

I didn’t enjoy reading very much of this at all. It’s not that I didn’t agree with most of what James was ranting about because he made some intelligent, thoughtful points. But that is not why I read fiction. At times, it felt like I was grading one of my student’s English assignments.

There is probably an audience for this kind of novel. It certainly won’t be coming from the Republican Party, but my students (several of them started this) nor myself would be included in that audience.

This book sort of had the movie FIGHT CLUB feel to it just without Brad Pitt and all the good violence, so basically you’re left with a sniveling Edward Norton.

To end on a positive, I thought there was a very touching couple pages where James described, in third person, going on a date for the first time. I thought Nelson captured a genuine moment there. Sadly, I just didn’t find enough of that to make me want to read more.