Scan barcode
A review by stevendedalus
Waste by Andrew F. Sullivan
4.0
Jesus this is the bleakest thing I've ever read. Set in a fictional Oshawa in the late eighties, it follows a bunch of wrecks of white trash people as they muddle through their wasted lives in a wasted city with violence and gore and black, black comedy.
It's a deep-dive into the wreck of the industrial suburb. Bad things just continually happen, awful coincidences bring people together, and it ends badly for most. It's a helluva microcosm to throw on the page and I can't say it's a particularly pleasant read, but it's very effective at what it's going for which is to convince you of the hopelessness that suffocates a town once it's forgotten by the economy and society in general.
Sullivan is a very talented writer, which makes the continued assault on light and good at least somewhat bearable. Though it also makes the grotesquerie that much more effective.
I don't think I've ever read anything quite like this. It's short on descriptions of the young, white, male protagonists, giving them them that everyman, faceless thing. Its story is discombobulated and only fits together at the end in, what else, a bloodbath. It's just unrelenting and hard and unique and I don't really want to reread it but I'm glad I got through it nonetheless.
It's a deep-dive into the wreck of the industrial suburb. Bad things just continually happen, awful coincidences bring people together, and it ends badly for most. It's a helluva microcosm to throw on the page and I can't say it's a particularly pleasant read, but it's very effective at what it's going for which is to convince you of the hopelessness that suffocates a town once it's forgotten by the economy and society in general.
Sullivan is a very talented writer, which makes the continued assault on light and good at least somewhat bearable. Though it also makes the grotesquerie that much more effective.
I don't think I've ever read anything quite like this. It's short on descriptions of the young, white, male protagonists, giving them them that everyman, faceless thing. Its story is discombobulated and only fits together at the end in, what else, a bloodbath. It's just unrelenting and hard and unique and I don't really want to reread it but I'm glad I got through it nonetheless.