The Fall Guy

My favorite hobby, if I'm being honest, is hyper-analyzing. I love analyzing my own life decisions as well as those of my friends. (Sometimes I even offer my own uninvited opinions —to mixed effect!) Being a habitual reader provides a welcoming outlet, a continuous stream of new 'friends' to analyze.

And in this sense, The Fall Guy is doozy! It's a deeply psychological novel where much of the action takes place inside the characters' heads. As tension builds over the course of a long hot summer at a country house in upstate New York, there was much for me to scrutinize. And when—BANG—things boil over to disastrous effect, it's that much more satisfying.

Matthew, The Fall Guy's protagonist, has been to a therapist or two, and that means he's also been instructed to assess his actions. A tumultuous upbringing saw him plucked from the English upper class when his father disappeared and left him penniless. Now, Matthew, a chef talented in the kitchen but a failure as a restauranteur, struggles to find comfortable footing in his adult years. Knowing his backstory made his insecurities endearing to me and yet, something seems a bit off with Matthew...

When Matthew heads to his cousin Charlie's summer home, presumably to provide entertainment and delicious meals for Charlie and his wife, harmless miscommunications fester and old harmful family dynamics reemerge. This is the stuff of amazing armchair-therapist fodder. At first, I read the book slowly, wondering if Matthew's grasp on his own motivations and others' actions was as accurate as he himself seems to think.

At a certain point, as the book's perspective widens, things start to veer off course, and this is where I started reading really, really fast. To put it briefly: shit hits the fan. Though the fan is totally not what you think, it's like a different fan in a different room, or maybe a different house altogether. That, my friends, is how the second half of this book catches you off guard, changes gears, and becomes a thriller.

To the credit of James Lasdun's amazing and unexpected character development, I had a lot wrong. I don't want to rob you of the enjoyment of uncovering this book's secrets on your own. The enjoyment is real, it's well-earned, and it might result in you reading the second half of the novel approximately 8x faster than you read the first. Meanwhile, I'll be over here learning how to knit.