{"id":16158,"date":"2004-02-05T16:11:54","date_gmt":"2004-02-05T21:11:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2004\/02\/05\/1767.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:45:21","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:45:21","slug":"book-report-sir-apropos-of-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2004\/02\/05\/book-report-sir-apropos-of-not\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: Sir Apropos of Nothing"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Just because the title caught Your Humble Blogger’s eye, Peter David’s Sir Apropos of Nothing<\/I><\/a> (New York: Pocket 2001) is the latest Book Report.\n\n

My conclusion, after five-hundred-odd pages, is that I really dislike antiheroes. Antiheroes are, by definition, protagonists that lack heroic characteristics. In practice, antiheroes are protagonists whose authors take great care to portray as worthless incompetent sleazy cowardly libertine greedy self-centered bumbling wretched caddish blackguardly worms. In great detail. With lots of adjectives, don’t you know. And lots of time-wasting passages where the hero thinks “There’s no way I’m going to engage in that heroic activity; I’m a worthless incompetent sleazy cowardly libertine greedy self-centered bumbling wretched caddish blackguardly worm. Oh, what a worthless incompetent sleazy cowardly libertine greedy self-centered bumbling wretched caddish blackguardly worm I am. For were I not a worthless incompetent sleazy cowardly libertine greedy self-centered bumbling wretched caddish blackguardly worm, I would surely engage in that heroic activity. Where’d everybody go?” Often it’s not even heroic activity, just ordinary day to day living.\n

I don’t like Lucky Jim<\/a><\/I>. I don’t like Seinfeld<\/I>. I don’t want to spend my leisure time with the Jim Dixons or George Costanzas of the world.\n

I do like villains. I even like heroes. I also like main characters that are flawed. The main characters in books I read over and over are people such as Yossarian, Reuven Malter, Nikeratos the Tragedian, Bilbo Baggins, Jo March—heck, the Continental Op stole a crutch from a cripple in “The Gutting of Couffignal” (although there were extenuating circumstances). I don’t think any of these are antiheroes; they do the right thing, more often than not, despite their flaws. More importantly, the authors like them, and don’t waste my time with a lot of discussion about how unlikable they are.\n

OK, now I’ve got off track. And Apropos (of nothing) isn’t a real antihero, he’s the far-more-obnoxious hero in antihero’s clothing, which means that Mr. David spends even more time than Mr. Amis in discussing his antihero’s antiheroism, just to set up the joke. Which, I’m afraid, is a flaw in the book anyway. On the plus side, it’s actually well-plotted (in the sense of being amusing, not in the sense of being tight), and amusing in parts. Not enough to make the hedons flow in the right direction for me, though.\n\n

Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just because the title caught Your Humble Blogger\u2019s eye, Peter David\u2019s Sir Apropos of Nothing (New York: Pocket 2001) is the latest Book Report. My conclusion, after five-hundred-odd pages, is that I really dislike antiheroes. Antiheroes are, by definition, protagonists…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16158"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16158\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16910,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16158\/revisions\/16910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}