A Short Film About Disappointment

Starred review from June 4, 2018
A movie critic certain no one reads his reviews fills them with details of his personal life in this sharp, funny debut set in America’s Central Hub some time in the future. Narrating reviews (there are 80 in total) instead of chapters, Noah Body begins with a critique of Having, Not Having, Being, Not Being, a film he sees while hiding in a theater from a man he has angered. Noah’s strong opinions and acerbic humor, though entertaining to the reader, undermine his own personal relationships, including the burgeoning romance with a doctor he consults because he believes himself possessed by his ex–best friend. Noah also dreams about writing, directing, and starring in his own movie. Contemporary cinema still features vampires, monsters, heists, crime family melodramas, and historical dramas such as Unsurfable, which depicts how most of the world’s data and wealth were erased. Noah envisions his own film in the Renaissance and sets about trying to get it actually made. With weapons-grade wit, Mattson satirizes movies, reviewers, and life in the data age. Even the almost-touching scene when robotic AlmostPerson Lawrence observes a sunset ends in edgy irony. Mattson’s exhilarating novel is rife with ingenious humor and inventiveness.

June 15, 2018

Each short chapter of this debut, set in a future American dystopia, takes the form of one of Noah Body's film reviews, describing absurdist, over-the-top genre experiments taken to extremes. These reviews, which Noah is certain no one reads anyway, occasionally stray far from the topic of the film to incorporate the underlying plot of the novel, along with cynical and hilarious insights about the world around him. The intellectually arrogant and seemingly conscienceless Noah is convinced that he is possessed by the ex-best friend who "stole" his wife and engages in a comical, escalating feud with a friend of a friend that starts over a difference of opinion about films. He does this all while bilking a wealthy acquaintance for funding for his passion project, a film called Altarpiece about a Renaissance painter. This is a topic with special resonance in an Orwellian future, in which nearly everything is ersatz, squirted from the nozzle of a 3-D printer. VERDICT The critic who wants to be a creator sounds like a cliché, but there is almost nothing stereotypical about this wildly experimental and sprawling novel that at times is laugh-out-loud funny.--Lauren Gilbert, Sachem P.L., Holbrook, NY

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 15, 2018
A film critic in a dystopian near future ruminates on life and art in the pages of his movie reviews.This eccentric debut by Mattson offers a deviant take on the epistolary novel by couching its sad tale of regret in the pages of 80 movie reviews. Our esteemed author is professional nobody Noah Body, one of two film critics for a content aggregator dubbed the Central Hub Slaw, a publication with so few readers that Body treats his column as a kind of personal soapbox/therapy session. Body's world is kind of a mess after some unknown blight locals call "the crisis," with neighborhoods divided into safe zones and places like "Mini Aleppo," where Body lives; citizens "chipped" with GPS trackers; and travel taking place by suborbital "slingshot" capsules. The ghost that haunts Body's story is his ex-wife, Isabel, who has recently run off with his best frenemy, James Osvald, a clerk and amateur filmmaker whose death Body imagines with glee. "Isabel who was my wife," says Body. "I don't see her well anymore. Her face is like the face of a coin. The mold deforms as years of minting pass." On the domestic front, Body romances his therapist, Dr. Lisa, believes that Osvald has possessed his body, and plots the making of a complex period film called Altarpiece set in the Renaissance and backed by fellow critic Harris V. Jonson. The book's humor is often wry, but subplots involving Jonson's cheating wife and a thuggish vending machine tycoon trying to horn in on Body's film are far less engaging than his aberrant rivalry with Osvald. The gimmick of the novel, the 80 phantasmagoric films that Body critiques, is dryly funny, but readers may tire of Body's deadpan, aristocratic wit despite his outlandish surroundings.A potentially hilarious cogitation on art and artists that fails to fully exploit its comic potential.

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June 15, 2018

Each short chapter of this debut, set in a future American dystopia, takes the form of one of Noah Body's film reviews, describing absurdist, over-the-top genre experiments taken to extremes. These reviews, which Noah is certain no one reads anyway, occasionally stray far from the topic of the film to incorporate the underlying plot of the novel, along with cynical and hilarious insights about the world around him. The intellectually arrogant and seemingly conscienceless Noah is convinced that he is possessed by the ex-best friend who "stole" his wife and engages in a comical, escalating feud with a friend of a friend that starts over a difference of opinion about films. He does this all while bilking a wealthy acquaintance for funding for his passion project, a film called Altarpiece about a Renaissance painter. This is a topic with special resonance in an Orwellian future, in which nearly everything is ersatz, squirted from the nozzle of a 3-D printer. VERDICT The critic who wants to be a creator sounds like a clich�, but there is almost nothing stereotypical about this wildly experimental and sprawling novel that at times is laugh-out-loud funny.--Lauren Gilbert, Sachem P.L., Holbrook, NY

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.