Published by St. Martin's Press on May 10, 2016
Amp’d isn’t an inspirational story about overcoming adversity. The protagonist isn’t Franklin Roosevelt or Stephen Hawking. When Aaron lost his left arm, he realized that people who have the ability to overcome the worst imaginable circumstances just make everyone else look bad. He’s constantly being told that he should learn from adversity, but he’s learned that what doesn’t kill you ruins you instead. Whether Aaron is realistic or self-pitying or both is for the reader to decide.
A traffic accident sends the middle-age, newly one-armed teacher home to live with his father. Although he would prefer to remain there, relieving pain with medical marijuana and Vicodin, he eventually gets a job counting endangered fish, which only requires one arm (or maybe none) if you can do it without counting on your fingers. The point of the job is to prove that the fish are not being harmed by a dam, whether or not that is true.
Aaron often tries to be funny and occasionally succeeds. After he gets drunk and finds himself with a tattoo the next morning, he comments on “the pretension of Chinese characters, which I’m pretty sure never mean what the tattoo artist says they mean but universally represent poor judgment.” His descriptions of Army Corps of Engineer silliness are also pretty funny. Other attempts at humor (a lot of puns and lists) are inconsistently amusing.
When a kid with cancer makes an appearance, I worried that the book was going to become weepy. Instead, that’s when the book’s humor begins to hit its stride. Aaron can’t feel quite so sorry for himself when he’s with Cancer Kid, who doesn’t feel sorry for himself at all unless grownups are making a big deal about his disease instead of treating him like a normal bratty kid.
Amp’d strings together some reasonably funny sentences and has some poignant moments, but it is a story about characters who are in search of a plot. To the extent that an actual story emerges, it has something to do with the anger that Aaron’s friend (another amputee) apparently feels toward the dam. Unfortunately, the novel is nearly over before the plot arrives and it fizzles out before the ending. Family drama also keeps the story moving forward, but it all feels a bit underdeveloped. There's nothing wrong with a novel being character-driven rather than plot-driven, but Amp'd feels like a novel that is trying to be both, wiith only limited success.
The "feel good" nature of the ending -- sweet but not too sugary -- suits the story, although encountering a predictable ending to an unpredictable story is bit disappointing. Still, I liked the evolution of Aaron’s character and I enjoyed the novel’s better moments enough to recommend it. Amp’d does just enough to overcome its flaws.
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