A good gut punch.

Ugh. I try really hard to "make nice" when I'm writing reviews but I just could not stomach this book. When I received it from the early reviewer's program on Library Thing, I was initially captivated. I made my whole family read the first page, which I thought might be the funniest first page I'd ever read. But being inside this character's head literally made my head spin. The sarcastic, inappropriate and ADHD ramblings of the first page never stopped. I make myself read 100 pages of every book before I give up, and I made it, but only because I was trapped in an airport with nothing else to do. I left it on the chair in the airport, and actually felt kind of guilty that some poor person was going to pick it up and be subjected to a book full of f-bombs and drunken sex.

I enjoyed the consistency of humor and absurdity throughout this collection. Sumell has a keen comedic timing. Few of the stories “stuck the landing,” but his writing engaged me always. And the book even delivered a few unique insights about living, a handful of takeaways that left me .0001% wiser.

This is a very masculine book but it gives you the little, tiny inside views on how someone who seems so tough-skinned, may really just have deep wounds that are still healing. Very funny, at times very shocking, but beautifully written.

You like short stories, you hate short stories. It doesn't $^&%ing matter to Sumell. He will make you laugh, he will make you cry, he'll have you looking over your shoulder to make sure your parents aren't reading the things you can't believe were actually allowed to go into print.

A worthy buy.

[6/7/18 Update: A GR friend just rated this book, and seeing her rating reminded me, almost three years after I read this phenomenal book, how much I loved it. And since I have many more active friends now, I thought I'd resurrect my review. I envy anyone who gets to read this book for the first time.]

Raw, wild and free-wheeling, blasphemous, pained, and hilarious, Making Nice is a novel made from a collection of stories that work like the shards of a shattered window falling in such a way that you can still see the pane (pun intended). Angry-young-man narrator Alby is a pushover for a stranded baby cardinal he names Gary, his dog Sparkles, a possibly suicidal grasshopper, and a slug named Cherokee Bob, but he can't control his hair-trigger temper or his mouth or, the bigger problem, life—the fact that stuff happens, people suffer, and no matter how hard you love, everyone and everything dies. In this rollicking, nasty story of his travails, he explains himself:

Somewhere along the way I’d become incapable of relaxing, of allowing my body to be still, of rest. It isn’t that I have more energy than I know what to do with, because I don’t. It’s that my body is uncomfortable. It’s not pain, necessarily, but an antsy annoyance of the muscles and—when still—I become excruciatingly aware of just how uncomfortable I am. Then I have to move. I get up and pace around, shake my hand like I just touched something too hot, fidget, tap a table or countertop. I take long walks.

In a car, though, I’m stuck, and the entire drive up from Wilmington had been a nonstop series of seat adjustments and shoulder rolls, opening and closing windows, switching CDs and tinkering with the volume knob, rubbing my eyeballs and punching myself in the legs, as if hurting the leg hurts the ache that’s in it. I smoked a lot of cigarettes, cracked my knuckles, my ankles, my back and my neck, cracked everything that was crackable and bobbed my head in order to make a smashed bug on the windshield appear to fly just above the treetops bordering the interstate, until I banged my chin on the steering wheel while attempting to clear a particularly tall pine outside of Richmond. When that got old, I looked for things to look at: the rearview, the rearview, trees, a dead dog next to a blue hospital sign and GOD BLESS OUR SOLDIERS BEEFY BURRITO $1.39, the rearview—anything but the road itself. I’ve been in over a dozen accidents, all of which were my fault. I hit a bridge once. I drove through a closed garage door. It’s stopping I have a problem with.

Alby is a Holden Caulfield with no filters, on uppers, living in our crazy twenty-first century with way more noise, dysfunction, and heartbreak than Salinger ever imagined. This is scary-good funny writing that is sure to thrill some readers (moi) and enrage anybody who does not enjoy wallowing in and laughing at the darkness within us.

Check out my 2 Pros + 1 Con video review.

Reviews seem to be pretty polarized for this book and truly, I believe it will come down to how you perceive Matt Summell's incredibly unlikable character Alby.

In this collection, we see a very maladjusted man trying to deal with the loss of his mother and kind of railing against all of the other people in his life. It's well written and effective and the moments when it shined for me were moments that grasped the nature and helplessness and hopelessness of grief. There was something gripping about reading about Alby's mishandling of grief, because it spoke to grief.

Matt Summell, then, does well creating this crude and crass character but to me it came to at the detriment of my overall enjoyment of the story. I don't always need likable characters, but here it ended up leaving me cold. Alby treats women horribly and there was a scene of sexual assault that soured my experience with the collection.

I'm not sure who, if anyone, I'd recommend this to. It is a very short read at 200 pages and it was interesting to read and think about, but my own feelings are unresolved.

It's taken me a few weeks to process this book - and still, I'm not quite sure whether to give this one star or four. I'm settling on two, because Sumell is certainly a talented writer, some of it made me laugh out loud, and it touches on a topic I'm deeply interested in (and know too much about, unfortunately): the death of a parent. Sumell does a particularly good job of illustrating family dynamics before and after the loss of his mother (not a spoiler; you learn this in the first few pages) - how some people change and some stay the same, some become better people because of their grief, others become worse. I lost my father at 23, and something very few people warned me about was how different my entire family would become after his death. It's as if we no longer had a center, and Sumell does a really good job of demonstrating how the loss of his mother impacted him individually and collectively as a family.

The main character in Making Nice is Alby, and frankly, he's the reason I would give this one star. I hated this character for so many reasons. He's disgusting and crass and crude and gross and doesn't do anything that's the least bit charming or endearing throughout this entire book.

But let me tell you about a scene with Alby that made me feel ALL THE RAGE. I almost stopped reading the book because of it (and probably would have had I not felt an obligation to continue and review because I received an ARC from Goodreads). Our Alby is making out with a girl at a bar - maybe it was a friend of a girlfriend's friend, someone he knew vaguely but definitely not his girlfriend - and takes her home. They continue making out, etc. This gal (which truly, I have no idea how someone like Alby ever convinced anyone to make out with him) continues to tell him that she doesn't want to have sex. Alby keeps trying to "slip it in" (without protection, of course) and she continues to tell him that she doesn't want to have sex and he keeps trying to "slip it in" anyway until she finally is too drunk or tired of protesting or whatever and then Alby is victorious because she gives in and they have unprotected sex and the way he writes about his success makes me want to vomit. Oh good grief I'm feeling so rageful again writing about this. You know what? I don't even know how to rate this. It makes me so angry that a writer would create a character who could write so flippantly about non-consensual sex and make it seem as though NOTHING was wrong with it. There are going to be guys, old and young, who read this and think "oh yeah, I've done that before, heh" and girls who read this and think "I want to scream and punch someone in the jaw because I've had guys do that before and this male writer is writing about this with no care in the world, like it's totally not assault to ignore a girl who says no because I'll just slip it in and then she agrees right?"

Maybe this is more of an issue for me than I realized. Yeah, I can't give this one three stars. Because this isn't the only time Alby completely disparages women, it happens throughout the entire book. It reminded me a little of [a:Charles Bukowski|13275|Charles Bukowski|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1387554724p2/13275.jpg]'s work, which also gives me the rage due to his treatment of female characters.

I have a feeling guys are going to like this one, but I wonder how females will react. I was going to write this really introspective response linking to this article by Jim Shepard about redemption of characters in Flannery O'Connor's work but after processing the scene above, I just can't give it that level of respect just now.

So, in conclusion: Sumell is talented, but read this one at your own risk.

Still processing this one, but I think I liked it. Made me laugh aloud multiple times and was delightfully riddled with cursing, but at the same time had an undercurrent of tenderness that came to the surface toward the end. A unique look at a character's reaction to his mother's death.