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Title: Just Not Sure
Review: I tried to like this collection, and there were moments, some pretty dog-gone good ones, but there were other moments, lots of them, where I wanted to wing the book across the room and say, "You're kidding me! This is the stuff that has folks yakking for ten years now?" There's a lot of the stuff of the novice writer in here, pages and pages of it... In a literary sense, the book remeinds me of a kid who comes down a Sunday morning to the stale remnants of his parents' wild party and smokes a pretzel and sips flat ginger ale while dealing himself a hand. I mean, don't we have any adults writing?I don't think I have ever been as convinced that Am. Lit. is in need of a new voice, a new sensibility. I think the spareness that so many write about in praising Mr. Johnson comes from his gut instinct that he has nothing to add.By the way -- I read 'Tree of Smoke,' tried to read it, but found it not only unbearable, but false. 'Jesus' Son,' at least, is not false.
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