Days of GraceDAYS OF GRACE tells the story of Ian Johns, a bleary and depressed thirty-one-year-old "professional student," who, in the throes of an early-life crisis brought on by his mother's untimely death from cancer, quits law school after surviving the rigors of its proverbially arduous first year to become an itinerant without a plan. With a voice and sensibility that can be likened to Lethem, Sedaris, Coupland and Kerouac, the book is unabashedly picaresque and Neo-Beat, written in a roman à clef and journalistic style which has been described as "modified stream-of-consciousness." It is at times dark and bittersweet but is relentlessly tinged with bright-sharp edges of humor. As we go forward with Ian on his travels and go back into the near-past to sit at his mother's deathbed in his childhood home, viewing the world through his admittedly cracked prism, we come away having learned something universal about ourselves, Y2K America and maybe even mortality itself..
Part autofiction, part road novel paean to Generation X and On the Road. |
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The writing style is delightful, both light and funny and at times dark and besetting. Falkin could easily be likened to the aforementioned Lethem or to Augusten Burroughs or even J.D. Salinger.