I know a lot of people have been raving about this book, but several members of my book group had read it and they didn’t sound too impressed. So I had decided against reading it, but then my book club voted on it. So here goes:
I had heard from members of my book group that, although it’s supposed to take place in Chicago, Blake Crouch (who lives in Colorado) got a number of things about Chicago majorly wrong and it annoyed them enough to affect their enjoyment of the book. It was one of the reasons I had decided not to read this book, but when my book club voted on it, I thought, “Well, maybe the mistakes will be so minor I can just overlook them.”
Nope. Within the first few pages the main character (Jason Dessen) says he’s going to a bar called “Village Tap” that he claims is located in Logan Square.
I’ve been to the Village Tap. It’s definitely in Roscoe Village.
Shortly after that Jason claims to be driving down Pulaski with the lake on one side and the city on the other. Nope. Wrong again. So wrong.
What got me about these mistakes is there was absolutely no reason to make them. Not only are they easy enough to look up online without even needing to visit Chicago (Google Maps is your friend. Use it), but Crouch went out of his way to provide details that didn’t need to be there. He even provided an exact address for the building Jason’s abductor took him to, which was totally unnecessary. All he needed was for the driver to tell Jason when and where to turn. The narrator can still describe the scenery without using the names of streets that are actually on the other side of the city.
There were other minor mistakes and inconsistencies that an editor should have caught, such as Jason inexplicably having over $100 in cash immediately after having to beg for money on the streets just to buy a meal. Seriously, did Crown even bother to have a single editor look at the manuscript before rushing it into print?
OK, now that that’s out of my system, let’s talk about the plot. So Jason leaves his wife and son for a few hours to have a drink with an old friend. Shortly after leaving the bar, he gets abducted, driven to an abandoned warehouse on the South Side, and drugged. When he wakes up he is surrounded by people he doesn’t recognize, but they all greet him as an old friend they haven’t seen in roughly a year and a half. Not only that, but Jason’s wife is not his wife (she’s an ex-girlfriend) and his son was never born.
On the bright side, Jason is now a world-renowned physicist (instead of a physics professor) who has managed to figure out a way for people to travel to alternate dimensions in which they made different decisions. The whole book is built on the theory that, every time we make a decision, an alternate reality is created in which we made the opposite choice, leading to an entirely different set of consequences. Well, Jason (or some version of him) has found out how to access those alternate dimensions.
Someone in my book group did mention that, since the book is all about alternate universes, maybe Jason’s Chicago is not the one we know and love in this universe. I suppose that’s plausible, but it still annoyed me. If that was the case, Crouch could have included his character finding a version of Chicago in which Pulaski was in the right place and he went “that’s weird” and then we could all laugh about it and move on.
I won’t spoil anything. I’ll just say that if you want a fast-paced sci-fi read, this book is for you. It does ask some interesting questions about what makes us us and how the choices we make influence our personality, but mostly it’s full of short, choppy dialogue and lots of chase scenes. I’ve heard the film rights to the book were bought before the book was even published and I’m sure this will make an excellent movie. Hopefully they’ll even get someone who knows what Chicago looks like.
What did you guys read this week? Any other bestsellers that failed to impress?