Currie has been likened to Swift and Vonnegut, among other revered satirists. No doubt, the timeliness of this sendup will appeal to readers suffering from the whiplash of our new administration, especially those who prefer vibrant prose to boastful tweets. Yet there’s more here than meets the eye. Hijinks and parody aside, Currie has written a tale whose backstory about the final months of K’s marriage may be even more compelling than the book’s political follies ... Currie navigates the funny-sad axis of human relations as well as anyone writing today. He writes eloquently on the complexity of marriage, conveying the gravity and humor at its core. He’s a consummate performer – engaging and generous, filled with provocative ideas and gorgeous language to express them.
...[a] dark, tender and oh-so-timely novel ... When the story approaches what seems to be a cataclysmic conclusion, K takes the measure of TV news and the current state of affairs: 'It may be true that there was a time in America when journalists sought clarity of circumstance and certainty of fact,; he says, 'but now, as I listened to speculation after speculation, each one more baseless than the last, I realized that the bread and butter of the modern newsman was opacity. When one has an endless succession of 24-hour news cycles to fill, the fewer known facts, the better.' Something most Americans can agree on.
In these latter days of 'alternative facts,' the idea of someone fearlessly dedicated to total, literal honesty sounds awfully appealing. I only wish I could say that this absurd story feels more subtle in execution than in summary. Alas, the plotting is sketchy, the social satire clunky. K.’s Socratic assault on the illogical, racist and shortsighted beliefs of his fellow citizens raises not a single surprisingly or truly provocative moment ... [Currie] knows what surprising havoc the persistence of grief can wreak on the heart. He doesn’t need a gimmicky plot premise; human life is strange and existential enough.
Currie’s three prior novels are expert blends of comic absurdity and calamity. It’s no surprise, then, that The Great False Binary is just one of the stops on The One-Eyed Man’s flinty path between hilarious and tragic ... K. and Claire travel, and are filmed when they get into scraps, like a more confrontational Jackass. The morality of such a show doesn’t escape Theodore, owing to the Great False binary... This complicity is intertwined with Einstein, whose biography K. has read and refers to throughout ...we’ve been reading that irony is dead, even as layers have subsequently been draped or slathered on even more heavily ...is rueful and unpredictable and honest and side-splitting in its depiction of our common struggle with the confines of truth and the defective airbag that is irony. His protagonist evokes a Kafkaesque maze of the mind, in the pitfalls and hazards of both isolation and speaking out.
Currie is a talented storyteller; K.’s reality show adventures, all told in K’s voice, offer sardonic humor and a healthy dose of outrageousness, but the heartbreaking passages on his wife’s last days are the real windows into K.’s damaged soul. Currie explores the pain of loss and possibility of redemption with aplomb, humor, and an empathetic hand in this heartbreaking tale.
Tomfoolery and shenanigans abound in this wicked indictment of our divided land. Even though the over-the-top ending sputters into a wild tailspin, Currie’s caustic humor and deadly sarcastic bite win out.
There are a lot of places a premise like this can go, and it’s not always to the credit of The One-Eyed Man that Currie eagerly pursues so many of them ... Covering all this turf while keeping the tone uniformly comic can make the novel feel at times ungainly and forced. But Currie is also an experienced hand with this material ... He can cogently explore the theory of relativity, capture his friends’ exasperation at hearing about it ('When did you turn into Mr. Roboto?'), and evoke the grief that sent K. on this trip to Rationalia.
