>>REVIEW
ATTENTION. DEFICIT. DISORDER.
Brad Listi
Simon and Schuster
356 pp.
In a world influenced by movies and television, we’ve become accustomed to quick, punchy messages as a primary way of receiving information, with everything from news stories to biographies condensed into sound bites. It only follows that books can do the same, telling stories and summing up ideas in small, pointed sections. Attention. Deficit. Disorder., a new novel by American writer Brad Listi, does just that, following a character named Wayne as he wanders around contemporary America.
Wayne, a recent university graduate, discovers that his ex-girlfriend, Amanda, has committed suicide. Further, he finds out that she had once been pregnant with his child, but had secretly aborted it. This sends Wayne on a trek around the United States and Cuba as he tries to come to terms with what has happened and what he’s doing with his life.
The novel is structured in short, episodic chapters. This makes the tightly structured book move along quickly, allowing individual sections to stand alone as fully realized shorts. As well, Listi throws in short tangents, supplementing the narrative with information on everything from Buddhism to the history of MDMA, to short biographies of famous people associated with Wayne’s experiences. Listi’s prose style is equally tight and often humorous, textured to suggest oral storytelling.
This weakness in Listi’s writing becomes even more apparent with the other characters in the novel – there’s virtually no sense of their individual personalities, or of what is distinctive about them. Even his descriptions of Wayne’s relationship with Amanda aren’t vivid enough to give the reader a sense of how he feels about her, or why her death torments him as much as it does.
Despite its shortcomings, Attention. Deficit. Disorder. is an engaging and funny book, describing not only a character’s somewhat aimless trek across the U.S., but also the outlines of the modern world and the universal search for the meaning of life. Where the novel comes up short, however, is its somewhat shallow approach to complex personal problems. While Listi doesn’t shy away from tackling Wayne’s fear, guilt and listlessness, there is little sense of psychology and it’s difficult to get a sense of how the character feels. |
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