Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #455520 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Customer Reviews

The Final Days of Youth
A vivid story about when boys become men and move on. I find myself frequently thinking about some of the issues this book brings to mind, such as the doom life can hit a person with. This book does a great job showing how people try to escape facing some of the responsibility of doing what is right or expected of human beings in a visceral way.
I also enjoyed the way Ben Tanzer captures the essence of time, taste, smell, drugs and thoughts using images of pop culture with a college frat atmosphere. Especially, interesting was the different perspectives of the characters told in first person.

Do ya feel lucky, punk?
To the extent that Lucky Man is a first-person narrative about young men coming of age, you could say it's fratire. But this is damned serious stuff, making the book much more ambitious, I think, than some of the other puke-on-my-own-shoes books in that genre.

More ambitious still--there's not one narrator here but four, each taking turns commenting on experiences they share, in interleaved chapters. Sammy, Jake, Louie, and Gabe are confreres passing from high school to college while they get stoned in every way imaginable and have encounters and even a few relationships with women. Note that they're not so much chasing girls as hitting on them (and getting hit on) like bumper cars.

In fact, that's the dynamic of their lives--drifting, smashing, and moving on. The author may have ambition, but these guys rarely make a meal more complicated than a bowl of cereal. None of them finds much direction or purpose at all (one tries religion, briefly). Perhaps they would get motivated if they could only channel their anger, which mostly stems from life's random punishments. But they turn most of their angst in on themselves as they get wasted daily, punctuated by an occasional fistfight arising from little or no provocation.

First-person narration is a bold choice because the main character can't report on events that affect him but he can't see, or might not even hear about. This challenge is partially overcome in this book by Tanzer's telling the story from multiple points of view. Then, it's a challenge to give each of the voices a distinctive character. While these boys each has his quirks, their attitudes, outlooks, and prospects are much more alike than they are different. Maybe it's a generational thing--they've all given up, bowing to the great god of Pointlessness.

This is, as the reader will guess soon enough, a last-man-standing story. In the end, the question is, "What's it all mean?" Tanzer gives no clue, but I do give him a great deal of credit for at least raising the question.

Gerald Everett Jones is the author of My Inflatable Friend: The Confessions of Rollo Hemphill

Very Good
Per the authors request, I reviewed this book. Findings are below...
In this book, Lucky Man, by Ben Tanzer, I found many grammatical errors, such as commas needed in several places and words missing to complete phrases, such as the/and/a. I found misspellings and words used out of context, such as their/there, and anyways/ any way. For a finished and published work, I am very disappointed with the proofreading and editing on the publishing company's behalf. At times the language can be abusive, but given the situation and the characters I don't feel it takes away from the story. In my opinion, the dialog between characters can be confusing in the way it was written, but did not deter me from reading.
In saying that, I found this book very compelling. Written in the first person point of view, from four different sources is not an easy task to pull off successfully. The characters were believable, and the plot intriguing. Ben Tanzer brings the hardships of four young men into your mind and tugs the heartstrings with each trial of their young lives. Reading it made me feel as if I was delving into a forbidden diary, and brought me closer to the characters. It certainly changes your thinking of an ordinary telephone ring. In retrospect, the ending was superb and had a twist, that even though the author worked up to, I did not see coming. For a debut novel, I am, overall, impressed.