'Well' is deep in tales of despair, pain
"Well" is not a novel for the faint of heart, or those who insist on the discipline of plot (since there really isn't one). Set physically in the Seattle suburb of Federal Way and psychologically within a miasma of working-class despair, this debut novel by 26-year-old Matthew McIntosh is a disturbing pastiche that introduces the reader quickly to countless characters, hooks you with their vivid compulsions, and then abandons them for the next tale of betrayal and compromised dreams.
McIntosh's greatest strength is his ability to compress narrative to its most unflinchingly painful elements. His vignettes resonate like drunken stories told at high-school reunions of how all those forgotten people turned out: the young romances that ended in anger-management classes, health problems, abortions, phone sex, self-hatred.
In all of the tales you get the sense of the characters being "just people" dealt lives that worked against them or allowed them to defeat themselves. This is not a novel of the literati, the yuppies, the techies or the urbane — these are the forgotten people who stink of loneliness and too much booze and cigarettes. You could meet them in a dive bar, a garage or in windowless warehouses.
Seattle readers will enjoy the flashes of local color — that long Greyhound bus ride to Eastern Washington, the ill-fated Seattle Supersonics game that becomes the pivotal point of one section of the novel, the gunman who sent a Metro bus careening off a bridge in Fremont. But McIntosh's characters could be playing out their ill-fated dramas in any American suburb, and the sense of doomed familiarity is what makes "Well" a powerful (if chaotic) read.
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