Here is the problem with the book. The author switches between people and timeframes without any forewarning. One sentence about person A will change course and end up being about person B. There are few paragraphs in the book - I counted 3 - and every sentence just runs into the next. Half the time I couldn't even figure out what the story was about.
Ostensibly, the story was supposed to be about an elderly woman in 1971 that was catatonic and in an insane asylum. Her doctor gave her some experimental Parkinson's drugs and this woke her as well as several other patients that were catatonic. The story bounces between Audrey as an elderly woman woken up and herself as a younger woman before she became catatonic. At no time in the book (maybe it is revealed in the last 50 pages?) does the author reveal why she was catatonic in the first place.
Also, the story is about Audrey's brother who was in the war - but there is no rhyme or reason as to why the author spends so much time talking about her brother Stanley. It is like a separate story unto itself.
The little bit that I told you about the story -- the few paragraphs that it took to tell you this, is about how much time it took the author to tell these same things in the book. The rest of the book was random and incoherent.
Here is an example of one of the sentences in the book - and mind you I don't even really know who the character Zack is: "This, Zack had thought, is my awakening and it's always been thus, when I was his age, coming out of the Everyman, I'd experience the same estrangement from my shoes, cow, folded and sewn.
The italics on the last of the sentence are the author's not mine. The author put things randomly in italics all through the book. But speaking of that sentence - see how he just goes from a sentence that is fairly coherent to something about cows being folded and sewn? How can anyone read a book like that and take anything away from it?
If you are interested, here is a review from NPR that actually thinks the book is brilliant. I think this is the first time I've disagreed with anything NPR put out!
Rating: 1 / 10
ISBN: 978082120724
Publisher: Grove Press
Edition: 1st Edition