Driven by concept rather than character, and C.K. aspires only to concoct a narrator as naive and transparent as possible without worrying too much about how he got that way ... Might have taken on the archetypal aspect of a fairy tale, in which characters’ motivations and inner lives are externalized or simply unexplained. But C.K. has instead adopted the tone and style of realist fiction, which leads readers to expect a novel’s fictional world to abide by the rules of the one we live in ... Inauthentic ... What ought to have been cashiered as mere juvenilia winds up printed between hardcovers.
One might wonder why C.K. didn’t set out to write a comic novel, why he gave us something so bleak. And yet bleakness is the quality I associate most with his work ... In any case, Ingram is hilarious, regardless of C.K.’s intentions. Even the summary on the back cover reads like a bad movie tagline from30 Rock.
Relentlessly belabored and unclear ... The dull prose never gets better through Ingram’s 288 pages, and there’s no compelling narrative ... But this sort of nuance is not something C. K. is interested in exploring in Ingram. Its pages are full of stock, one-dimensional characters ... The mundane contempt that C. K. seems to hold for his characters and readers alike is the book’s defining feature.
Its period somewhat indeterminate, Ingram is a Bildungsroman about a simple-minded yet dogged boy who is born into poverty so abject his ailing mother sends him off alone, convinced he will fare better solo. His familial life is so brutal that these early sections are almost poverty porn ... But as Ingram’s journey through Texas picks up, the sheer force of CK’s empathy renders him a living, breathing character ... Ingram is about a youth forced to take responsibility in lieu of guidance, though some might wish its author had let his irresponsible side off the leash more. Nevertheless, it’s an accomplished, deeply felt debut.
