You Don't Love This Man: Review | BOOK CLUB CLASSICS!

61mDBK KXnL. SL160 You Dont Love This Man: Review You Don’t Love This Man by Dan DeWeese

Release date: 2011 / 336 pages

Synopsis (from the back cover): On the morning of his daughter Miranda’s wedding, Paul learns that the bank he manages has been robbed — apparently by the same man who robbed it twenty-five years before. As if that weren’t enough, Miranda, who is set to marry Paul’s best friend — a man twice her age — seems to have gone missing…

First Sentence: I lost my daughter once.

Review: About 200 pages into this novel, I realized the word that best described my experience of You Don’t Love This Man was “disorienting,” yet I had no idea why I felt this way.

At times I wondered if this novel may have been an even better screenplay — a quirky, independent film along the lines of Lost in Translation, with more emotional substance. However, much of the narrative involves internal dialogue that would be nearly impossible to recreate in any meaningful way through film. So, then I wondered if this novel might have been even better as a short story — the tight focus on one character would be a pleasure to analyze in a fiction class.

I kept reading, finished the last 135 pages, and was deeply moved by the ending. When I turned the last page, I was reminded of a deeply emotional moment in my own life. The evening before my wedding, as my husband and I were walking to an informal, outdoor reception, I saw my dad for the first time since we had arrived for the weekend and blurted out, “That’s my dad!” with unexpected, childlike enthusiasm. Obviously I had expected to see my dad that evening, but I realized at that very moment how lucky I had been my entire life to have a dad I could count on for support and unconditional love. This is what the character Miranda experiences on the eve of her wedding as well.

However, the focus of the novel is not on Miranda, but on her father Paul. After reading the supplemental materials at the back of the book, I discovered why this narrative was so disorienting throughout: “…the main character of this story is a man who is sidelined. And this novel is what we hear when this man, who has spent the greater portion of his life standing quietly to the side, decides to start talking.” Paul works at a job he does not love, endures a marriage he often does not enjoy, and does his best to understand the people around him as well as himself.

Although Paul is the protagonist, he never seems to be the hero — in fact, there is no hero or star in this novel — which is an unusual experience. Paul is complex, occasionally irritating, often frustrating, yet very authentic and finely wrought character. I’ll admit that more than once Paul made me quite grateful not to be a man — and I think male readers may enjoy this novel even more than women might. But I was impressed by the off-set perspective and well-crafted characterization throughout — and then deeply moved at the end.

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Interested in another opinion on the novel? Check out the reviews below:

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Thursday, March 10th: Boarding in My Forties

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Monday, March 21st: StephTheBookworm

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