While Mr. Breakfast is pure pleasure to read, it does call to mind the themes and sleights-of-hand associated with films such as Inception, Total Recall, Groundhog Day and Back to the Future ... Mr. Breakfast is the first Carroll novel in several years, but it seems to me as masterly as his earlier books. It will surprise you, make you laugh and scare you — and then, just when you think it’s over, add several extra twists before bringing this Rubik’s Cube of a story to just the right, emotionally muted conclusion.
Jonathan Carroll’s Mr. Breakfast is, for much of the journey, entertaining and thought-provoking ... Early on, there’s too much clunky exposition and a sense that Carroll is merely sketching in the characters ... There are other awkward or overexplained stretches later too, but Carroll eventually settles in and does a good job of raising the stakes for Graham in each new scenario, building suspense as Graham feels the weight of his actions ... Unfortunately, Carroll falters again at the end ... In another universe, perhaps, there’s a version of Carroll’s novel where the final 40 pages are as entertaining and provocative as the best parts of the story that preceded it. Whether it’s worth jumping to that timeline just for a more satisfying ending is up to you.
Carroll is compared with Haruki Murakami almost as often as he’s called a writer’s writer, but the comparison makes intuitive sense. Like Murakami, Carroll is a magical realist, rather than a systematizer or a worldbuilder: The rules of magic and the logic of the supernatural matter less than the mysteries of the heart ... I read Mr. Breakfast in three enthralled sittings, but it’s not flawless. Carroll is in love with our world and its wonders, but that general enthusiasm and genial wisdom sometimes shade into schmaltz or twee ... These complaints, however, hardly detract from the book. The novel thrilled me; it made me reflect on art, love, choices, and regrets; it left me with tears in the corners of my eyes and a smile on my face. What more can a reader ask for?
Every bit as inventive and engaging as the best of his earlier novels, and still with a sinister edge, this is more dream than nightmare, and a pure delight to read.
By any measure, this is vintage Carroll, which is another way of saying it’s entirely new ... the sense of infinite possibility...is exhilarating, even through the novel’s somber, sad, or occasionally sentimental moments. While Carroll seems pretty disciplined in following the rules laid out in the beginning by the tattooist Annie, the experience of following Patterson’s life in all its permutations can sometimes feel, as one character says, ‘'like tying water in a knot,’' which, come to think of it, is pretty much what trying to explain what any Carroll novel feels like. Fortunately, the effect can be both wistfully melancholy and downright joyous.
Among Carroll's novels...this is one of his most elusive—the narratives overlap and interact with a slippery interior logic. The new novel also may be his most lyrical. Few recent works of fiction in any genre have touched on the vagaries of life, love, and art more movingly or with deeper understanding. An intoxicating, deeply affecting novel by the influential fantasist.
Carroll takes pains to assure the reader that the protagonist’s jokes are funny and his photographs magnificent, and the narrative frequently stalls to explain the message of a scene through heavy-handed metaphor, leaving little room for imagination or interpretation. Together with a stable of female characters almost universally concerned with motherhood, and disabled characters built on tired stereotypes, it makes for a turgid reading experience. While the alternate realities deliver some genuine surprises alongside the occasional heartfelt meditation on the randomness of life and the futility in trying to control it, the whole is too trite to be very thought provoking. All but Carroll’s most devoted fans can skip this.
