[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.