Caroline's Reviews > Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Many reviews of WTF reference a list of lauded authors whose styles seem to be in the soup of this book - a dash of Pynchon, a touch of Foster Wallace. I didn't know that when I started reading it, as I'd picked it up on the strength of a friend's recommendation, plus one line of a NY Times review that said it was a late contender for 'book of the summer'. But sure enough, as I was reading, I was quickly thinking 'ah, this is like a mix of Zadie Smith (in NW3), Gary Shteyngart (Super Sad True Love Story), Don DeLillo (White Noise)'. And it's an enjoyable mix, if you're willing to go on the ride. The plot is sort of bonkers, sort of not; sort of humorous, sort of not. Shafer isn't trying to be overtly literary in style, but the prose has depth - there are clever turns of phrase that made me pause and enjoy the words as well as the plot. And just like SSTLS, it has left some questions in my mind about the right way to live online life.

I was interested to see that it's been pegged so strongly by some as a Boy Book. I don't know about that. I'm a woman, and it felt like a pretty cross-gender contemporary novel to me, with a balance between interesting characters and strange car chases (if we're going to be wildly stereotypical about female/male preferences). That duality might be why some reviewers felt the book only got going halfway through, and there's no doubt that it accelerates almost unnervingly beyond a certain point, switching from 'hmm, intriguing' to 'whoa, thriller'. Personally, I enjoyed it all, from those early character expositions to the pacy bombast, and I liked watching the plot weave reveal itself. The midpoint shift reminded me a little of other mongrels I'd enjoyed, like Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. There were a couple of places where the writing felt a little deliberate - I remember multiple evocative similes describing a man half in and half out of a too-small sleeping bag, where a single one would probably have been more powerful. But those moments were forgiveable and few.

When I finished the book, I agreed with many other reviewers in feeling the ending was a bit of a squib. That docked the book's rating by half a star for me, but not by more than that given the rest of the book's pleasures. And - especially with a few weeks of reflection - I do think it was smarter of the author to write a character-focused ending rather than a wildly bombastic denouement, which I'm sure he could have done equally well. I liked the fact that he took us back to the human heart of the narrative.

So it's an odd book, such a smorgasbord that it might be hard to follow other people's advice about whether you'll like it or not. I certainly thought it was a good read (so to speak), and am missing its craziness now that I've finished it. For balance, my next book should probably be a historical novel set before the telephone was invented.

[Update: I came back to this review to upgrade the rating from a fulsome 4* to a 4.5/5*, because I couldn't stop talking about the book for 2 weeks after reading it, and because in retrospect I can't see any other way the book could have ended without being trite. And my next book was indeed a historical novel without telephones: The Sisters Brothers. Also very good indeed.]