The One-Eyed Man by Ron Currie Jr.My rating: 4 of 5 stars
For much of the time that I was reading The One-Eyed Man, I didn’t really want to be reading it, which has absolutely nothing to do with the book, which is smart, funny, wry, tender and surprising in all the ways that I expected after having read Ron Currie, Jr.’s Everything Matters!Everything Matters.
But I started reading this book as America began protesting the murder of George Floyd, and I continued to read it through many days when I wished I had an input that wasn’t the voice of a white man from the county I grew up in. Currie is a lot of other things, too, and I mean any of this disparagingly, but as a reader who can count the number of white men I read in a given year on one hand and have fingers left over, I tend to value voices and stories that stretch beyond my understanding of the world. The lens of the white American man has been pretty reliably presented for most of my life, so it’s not where I tend to look.
It was a superficial disappointment and didn’t matter all that much, in the end. Ron Currie Jr.’s sharp eye for the terrors and embarrassments of the modern day is refreshing and validating. It makes you think he might be a difficult kind of guy to get along with, but you’d trust him to write a pretty good social studies book.
There’s a lot of satire here, and the kind of big, improbable-but-still-very-possible action that Currie is so skilled at, and a delightfully literal protagonist with a surprising
The descriptions of smoking are absolutely phenomenal. They’re enough to reform the most staunch non-smokers. This is a writer who has thought very long and hard about each intimate detail of smoking a cigarette. There is one action-packed chapter full of drama that I recall simply as “the cigarette chapter,” because the smoking weaves in and out of the narrative, providing safe and sturdy islands between chaos.
“Clarity? Certainty? Only children and republicans expect life to be that simple.” The One-Eyed Man is a delight, both an escape and heavily grounding, even if my timing was a little off.
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