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The Best Of Youth (2013)

by Michael Dahlie(Favorite Author)

3.63 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0393081850 (ISBN13: 9780393081855)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

W. W. Norton & Company

review 1: This novel started out being very entertaining. A young man loses both his parents in a boating accident and becomes rich. He is trying to find a wife, but has trouble with women. The main character, Henry, was written to be very dry and boring in my opinion. I had a lot of trouble connecting with him. There was one part of this novel that I found very amusing which was the goat incident (read it if you want to find out), but the book afterwards took a nosedive into the sleep aid category.
review 2: A story about a meek, hapless man, particularly since it’s told in a fairly serious and not comic vein, doesn’t sound like fodder for a very entertaining novel. But amazingly Michael Dahlie pulls it off in BEST OF YOUTH. Henry is the object of one humiliation ... moreafter the next here – the literary magazine he bankrolls won’t publish a story he’s written, a woman he’s been to bed with circulates an e-mail letting half of hipster Brooklyn know he’s a milquetoast and bore, and she doesn’t simply confess he’s bad in bed, she also lets his world know he makes funny face when he’s doing it. About all Henry has going for him is that he inherited $15 million when his parents died and that he does seem to have some writing talent, although curiously every story twenty-something Henry wants to tell has someone in their 80s or older as its protagonist. Henry does get involved in some interesting escapades. Without giving too much away, he gets in a mess when he’s first asked to watch over a million-dollar herd of goats and then later to ghost-write a young adult novel for a pompous actor, who thinks he has brilliant ideas about writing, with his most important rule being never to use parentheses. All the while Henry pines for a fourth cousin who has no romantic interest in him. About his only redeeming quality is that he genuinely cares for other people – a quality only his late father seemed to notice. In short order, you do start to root for Henry and the characters in his world are interesting enough and his adversaries rotten enough that you happily keep reading to see if Henry can finally score a few wins in his life. less

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