| Review: Tim Parks, Juggling The Stars |
| Tim Parks knows how to write. His prose is sharp and
efficient, his characters speak and live in the real world, and his
writing has wit and intelligence. His sixth novel, Juggling
The Stars, is a page-turner: surprising, horrifying, macabre,
and, at times, incongruously funny. Parks’ main character, Morris Duckworth, is a man you will not soon forget. Characterless, wry, and without principle, perceiving himself as put-upon, mistreated and misjudged by the world, Morris might simply live a life of rejection and unfulfilled expectations. But that’s a much more difficult book to write. And one that’s not nearly so readable. So Parks has added narcissism and rage to the mix, which turns Morris into a character capable of great damage. Juggling The Stars fits all too well into things currently going on in the world, and thus it lingers in the mind. It makes you wonder if we are acting out the imaginings of our Id more easily in this 21st century. Or if it just seems that way because the worst in all of us is so readily available, even necessary, to keep CNN churning twenty-four hours a day. For M. Duckworth, “It was the unreality of those murders that amazed him. You realized the world was probably full of murderers, war-criminals, child-molesters, who couldn’t believe they’d really done it. The truth was, everybody was capable of doing it, only incapable of accepting they were capable.” And so Juggling The Stars reminds you in all too real a way, that the person sitting beside you on the bus or in the next booth, the person stopping for you at the crosswalk or stowing his luggage in the overhead rack next to yours, the person who helps his daughter with her ketchup or smiles when he hands you your purchase, the person who pats your dog, lets you precede him through the revolving door, or nods good morning in the elevator may very well be doing it with fresh blood under his nails.
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