By: Jay Mcinerney Publisher: Vintage Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: Vintage Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 288 Publication Date: September 12, 1985 Release Date: September 12, 1985
Product Description: Ransom, Jay McInerney's second novel, belongs to the distinguished tradition of novels about exile. Living in Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan, Christopher Ransom seeks a purity and simplicity he could not find at home, and tries to exorcise the terror he encountered earlier in his travels—a blur of violence and death at the Khyber Pass.
Ransom has managed to regain control, chiefly through the rigors of karate. Supporting himself by teaching English to eager Japanese businessmen, he finds company with impresario Miles Ryder and fellow expatriates whose headquarters is Buffalo Rome, a blues-bar that satisfies the hearty local appetite for Americana and accommodates the drifters pouring through Asia in the years immediately after the fall of Vietnam.
Increasingly, Ransom and his circle are threatened, by everything they thought they had left behind, in a sequence of events whose consequences Ransom can forestall but cannot change.
Jay McInerney details the pattern of adventure and disillusionment that leads Christopher Ransom toward an inevitable reckoning with his fate—in a novel of grand scale and serious implications.
Good beginning, good ending, middle was not so great... In some ways similar to the many books I've read about Japan - "Angry Red Pajamas," "Learning To Bow," the cretinous "Pictures From The Water Trade," the equally cretinous "the Lady and the Monk," and "Thank you and Okay" - this is a novel about a guy who comes to Japan to learn something that you can only get in Japan. He's into karate, but unlike the protagonists of those other story he's also one of these unhinged fugitive types running from something from back home. He's had a difficult upper middle class childhood (boo hoo hoo) and he's had a run-in with danger in the backlands of Pakistan.
His life in Kyoto is about getting in and out of trouble, being disciplined, and overcoming the pain of the past. Ultimately, I didn't think it was a great novel, since it has too many colossally dumb decisions for one story. There's also one plot twist that's so unlikely that you just want to throw the book into the fire. But I would say that, in a way, I'm very happy with the way the book started and the way it ended, which you can't say about many books.
By the way, this Ransom has nothing to do with the Mel Gibson film, it's just the name of the main character - Christopher Ransom.
More Of A Travelogue Than A Novel Moment by moment I was holding out hope for this book until I got to the WTF ending which rushed at me freight train style on the last page, and then I retroactively lost all patience with the pointless 290-page trip I took with Jay Mcinerney, and actually felt miffed at the man, whom we all know can do so much better. All along I kept thinking that surely there was more to Ransom than what I was reading, right? I supposed that given the talent of the author the conclusion of Ransom would the remedy the tedium and justify the optimism I had to resuscitate several times while keeping track of his sidestepping micro-plot. The only reason I am rating this book three stars instead of two is for the fact it was an interesting travelogue that gave good and seemingly realistic depictions of life in Japan in the late 1970's. The actual story here of the free-falling American ex-pat Chris Ransom and his thinly-explained retreat from life, a symptom of his self-destructive quest for redemption in the face of the guilt he has needlessly put onto himself, well, that was but a ghostly presence throughout the book and in the end the entire story in Ransom proved aggravatingly empty of merit. May the gods of post-Brat Pack literature save us all from another Mcinerney novel this hollow.
Lot of exposition, not too much payoff After reading Bright Lights, Big City and Story of My Life, I went into this novel thinking I had an idea of what to expect. Very wrong. This novel is quite different from those too, and I can't say that that's really a good thing.
It felt to me like McInerney's style of writing falls a little flat when trying to deal with too many complex issues at once. He's got some flashbacks of a tragedy that took place between the main character and some friends in Afghanistan, the issue of Ransom and his father, Ransom and his karate class, his feelings of separation from the people around him in Japan (does he enjoy this or not?), and then finally, the semi-romantic character of Marilyn that never seems to add up.
McInerney has trouble bringing all of these plotlines together for a solid story, and it always seems like not very much is happening, but too much is happening. The character of Ransom is never developed enough to justify the flashbacks, and his problems with his father don't seem very well founded. Because of this it's difficult to get interested in the story.
The first 2/3 of the book feel like very slow, empty exposition in which you don't know if anything is ever really going to happen, but it keeps feeling as if something is right around the corner. The last 1/3 of the book is pretty interesting and I moved through it pretty quickly, but ultimately it's disappointing.
The most interesting part of this book is the description of the Japanese lifestyle, and Ransom's feelings about it. It feels very well researched and understood, however, that doesn't make this a good novel. If you're really interested in checking out all of Jay McInerney's stuff, go for it, but otherwise, I'd suggest skipping this one and going for stories that McInerney feels more comfortable writing: Big City, Big Money, Spoiled Kids... etc. I think he aimed high on this one and fell quite short.
Not a bad novel, really I read this as a lad in college, and I've always thought I was the only one who ever read it. It was fairly entertaining, and I liked the way Mcinerney writes, once he gets away from that second person singular "you you you" stuff in Bright Lights.
Hey people, the lead character's name is Christopher Ransom. That's some double-barrelled symbolism there ... C'mon, the ending won't be a trick or a shock.
I have never hated a book more than I hate Ransom. The majority of this book is empty exposition. People move about meaningless lives without purpose. The "protagonist" merely drifts through a life which offers him a potential to engage at every turn, which he either doesn't recognize, actively avoids. When he IS finally forced to take action, the plot is cliche, but you figure, you hope, you PRAY that it will be redeemed by something in the end. Meanwhile you've got an antagonist that was lifted almost directly from The Karate Kid. The "twist" ending never validates a single one of the pages you've wasted your life reading, and ultimately adds up to a useless stack of paper with no soul or meaning.
True Story: The moment I finished reading this book, I stood up, strolled across the lunchroom, and threw it into the garbage can, so no one would ever need waste brain cells on its pages again.
I hate Ransom like I hate Illinois Nazis. Read ANYTHING else.
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