Greathead knows a particular subset of these floundering young men very well, painfully well, hilariously well ... Acerbic ... Greathead attains a perfect balance among irritation, pathos and comedy.
A novel of many finely crafted, often funny moments that arrive episodically as the title character grows older ... The novel’s author, Kate Greathead, is a gifted storyteller who reels off dialogue filled with wit and humor so well it makes page-turning a pleasure and The Book of George an easy read ... George may be a doom-and-gloom sort, but that’s not the case for Greathead’s novel. Page after page, her writing is full of humor built around prickly sarcasm and woebegone twists in George’s life.
Wry ... Greathead is a competent storyteller with an eye for a psychologically telling detail; The Book of George is crisp at the sentence level, and its bittersweet denouement is touchingly rendered. But the characterisation is simplistic to the point of triteness. George registers primarily as a set of recognisably annoying traits: a patchwork creature, engineered for maximum relatability. He’s too hammed up to feel real, and his misadventures aren’t hilarious enough for him to pass muster as a comic antihero. The novel’s plot structure, not so much an arc as a linear litany of mishaps, is somewhat unsatisfying. Dull, coasting failure is a risky subject for narrative fiction: it is by its nature dreary and samey. Plodding along without purpose or direction, The Book of George resembles its protagonist a bit too closely.
Greathead’s portrayal of an aggrieved white man struggling to find his place in the world is as much a portrait of an unsuccessful artist as a young man as it is a portrait of our times. A mordantly wry examination of one disgruntled man’s life.
