SIGNIFYING NOTHING Now an E-book; Link to Ebook and Video, Plus Readers’ Comments
My novel, Signifying Nothing, is now an e-book!
Click here for a link to the e-book on amazon.com
Click here to see the two-minute video of Signifying Nothing on YouTube
READERS’ PRAISE FOR SIGNIFYING NOTHING:
“Quite an achievement. . . . The characters feel real, the family seems very distinctive but also somehow like other families, and the situation is engrossing — I really had to keep reading to find out what happened to everyone.”
“I am going to buy several more copies to give as gifts. I care so much for all the members of the family in the book, and I laughed and cried as they struggled . . .”
“[An] amazing novel — I was so moved by the whole family dynamic, sibling to sibling and parents to kids and husband to wife . . . a beautiful book.”
“Signifying Nothing moved me to tears at times.”
“A wonderful, lyrical book. . . . Truly, every one of the members of the Hobbs family came alive for me as if they were friends of mine.”
“A wonderful achievement!”
2 Responses to “SIGNIFYING NOTHING Now an E-book; Link to Ebook and Video, Plus Readers’ Comments”
The most puzzling thing about the Hobbs family was their apparent fundamental conviction that Lester had no inner life. Their reaction to his rhyming was that it was an embarrassment, or a potential tool for selling records or an indication that he could be made normal. No one bothered trying to reach him to see what he was thinking or feeling by encouraging a response to come out as a rap. Dalton Trumbo’s legless, sightless, blind, dumb protagonist from Johnny Got His Gun got more recognition of his personhood when communicating in morse code to a stranger than Lester ever got from his own family. The reader is made complicit in this because unlike the other characters, Lester’s inner thoughts are never narrated.
So why would that be the set-up of the book? It seems appealing, but probably too pat, to represent this as an analogy of the black middle class feelings toward the black underclass. The latter’s angry, contorted rap music expression is perhaps regarded as an embarrassment, a source to be exploited, or an indication of lurking sensibility that could be brought to flower taking dangerous expedients.
Perhaps a less labored explanation is that it’s easy to keep someone in a box after you’ve put them there, and breaking the box down requires too much personal rearrangement; most will not put in the effort. Accordingly, Lester was kept in his box.
Perhaps the lives of the members of the Hobbs family simply happened around each other without a lot of real sharing. No one ever finished another’s sentence. Perhaps their emotional distance from each other was really about the same as their emotional distance from Lester.
You come away from the book liking this family but thinking that you know them perhaps better than they know each other. You wonder if that’s by design.
Hey Bronxite,
Jung once said something like, “Most of us spend a lifetime learning about ourselves what a stranger could see at a glance.” I think you gave the book a sharp reading, and you’re right: the reader — an outsider — can see things about the family as a whole that the Hobbses don’t perceive about themselves, or about each other. Personally, I think every family is like that.
The point that you make in the first paragraph, essentially that no one tries to appreciate what Lester is, is the realization that Pat Hobbs comes to, in the most painful way possible.
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