Snapper

by Brian Kimberling

With wry humour and real freshness, SNAPPER charts the disastrous love affair between career birdwatcher Nathan Lochmueller and the place that made him.

Set in a brilliantly observed rural Indiana, 'the bastard son of the Midwest', SNAPPER is a book about birdwatching, a woman who won't stay true, and a pick-up truck that won't start. Here turtles eat alligators for breakfast, Klansmen skulk in the undergrowth, and truckers drop into the diner of a town named Santa Claus to ensure that no child's Christmas letter goes unanswered, while Nathan grapples with the eternal question: should I stay, or should I go? Kimberling's vision of small-town life is as characterful as Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon, but bristling with the tensions of race, class, poverty and prejudice, it makes for a bracing read.

• ISBN10: 0307908054
• ISBN13: 9780307908056
• Publish Date: 23 April 2013 (first published 1 January 2013)
• Publish Status: Remaindered
• Out of Print: 24 June 2015
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Pantheon Books
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 210
• Language: English

Reviews

[Michael @ Knowledge Lost]

Nathan Lochmueller is a birdwatcher; it is not every day you can build a career around doing something you love. Snapper charts the love affair that Nathan has with bird watching and the seamlessly unobtainable Lola. This is a coming of age, and quite possibly a semi-autobiographical, novel set in rural Indiana, ‘the bastard son of the Midwest’.

This is a bookclub book so it will be a little tricky reviewing this without some of the others’ insights being mixed in with mine. Normally I write a review before attending book club but I seemed to have run out of time. This is a coming of age story that explores life in Indiana as well as the life of a biologist.

Apparently the biology is right and this was important to one of the book club members, who is in fact a biologist as well. For me this felt more like a combination of little stories; just as I start getting into one story the chapter ends and we are on another story. Non-linear groups and the only thing that seems to hold the threads together is the relationship between Nathan and Lola.

I hate to use someone else’s thoughts but one group member hit the nail on the head when she called Lola a manic pixie dream girl. Nathan seems bitter and cynical about everything except when it comes to Lola. He seems blinded about this unobtainable girl, she was never leading him on but he still lived in hope.

I really enjoyed this novel, almost experimental in the style but I felt like the chapters were so disconnected it really took me out of the novel. My major problems with this novel were the editing. I don’t know how this got published with such inconsistencies in the formatting; some chapters have quotation marks, others don’t (I really don’t know why books choose not to have them) and this really annoyed me. If you want to print a book, at least have a standardised format for the entire book. It feels like some chapters were formatted by a different editor to the others and no one compared notes. Even the major mistake where the city Canberra is found in the country Canberra instead of Australia.

Apart from all of this, I enjoyed reading Snapper in all its nuances and will probably read more from this debut author. I’m sure if Brian Kimberling writes another novel it will be autobiographical and to do with biology which are not really my thing but this pretentious, semi-experimental novel is definitely my thing.

This review originally appeared on my blog; http://literary-exploration.com/2013/10/23/book-review-snapper/