For our late Christmas (February), the little genius kids of my childhood buddy Gary gave me a copy of the book, with the inscription reading how I would appreciate it because I am always "seeking different perspectives."
I am only twenty-five pages in to this contemporaneized epistolary novel, but I have a niggling need to sum up Charlie/the tone of the book/etc. already. What I have thus far: it is not that the events are dull, or that the life of this kid is so facile and thus trite; it is not that the work is so simplistically written. It is that this ordinariness is eating him up from the outside in. The "perks" may be that Charlie can and does receive that world of the banal, the mundane, the meaninglessness as une voyeur, as, as he would tell his reader, a wallflower. Is it that being a wallflower is what saves his ass?
We shall see. (And I shall likely change my entire prematurely blathered assessment.)
