Porter’s uproarious, intelligent debut centers on Raymond Champs, an illustrator of assembly manuals for a home furnishings corporation, who is charged with a huge task: To determine whether or not the world needs saving. It comes to him in the midst of a losing battle with insomnia — everybody he knows, and maybe everybody on the planet, is suffering from severe clinical depression. He’s nearly certain something has gone wrong. A virus perhaps. It’s in the water, or it’s in the mosquitoes, or maybe in the ranch flavored snack foods. And what if we are all too sad and dispirited to do anything about it? Obsessed as he becomes, Raymond composes an anonymous survey to submit to his unsuspecting coworkers — “Are you who you want to be?”, “Do you believe in life after death?”, “Is today better than yesterday?” — because what Raymond needs is data. He needs to know if it can be proven. It’s a big responsibility. People might not believe him. People, like his wife and his boss, might think he is losing his mind. But only because they are also losing their minds. Or are they?
Amazon.com
By day, Raymond Chandler draws the illustrations to instruction manuals for a furniture company. By night he battles insomnia and depression. On his way to and from work each day, he notes the sad, soulless look everyone around him seems to have in their eyes. He wants to know how all the world seems to have fallen into this state of being and why does everyone seem fine with it? He comes up with the idea to put together a questionnaire, first testing it out on his co-workers by posing it as a required bit of paperwork "coming down from corporate"... a "I'm just the messenger kind of thing", though as people start to fill these surveys out, he secretly reads the answers trying to find a common vein that would explain the outbreak of depression.
This was a quiet, quirky little read. Nothing much in the way of tension or action occurs, but there is some thought-provoking and humorous social commentary to be had by readers who can relate to battling depression or struggling with a less than satisfying current reality when held up against youthful, rose-colored dreams. My favorite parts were the actual survey answers -- I thought they were pretty revealing in how people can get so caught up in being proper or politically correct that they forget what their own opinions or feelings really are. They actually convince themselves that sub-par is perfectly fine and eventually stop striving for anything better than the "getting by" level. Everyone forgets or fears actually being honest with themselves.
While I enjoyed the survey Q&A bits, and a few humorous moments here and there, much of the rest of the book -- if I'm being completely honest here -- bored me a bit. And ugh, I really did not like Raymond's wife, Brenda. She was a special kind of bitter. There was a bit of a twist at the end but it left me a little confused and wondering well, if you're going to go that route, what was the point of the rest of the story?! I could see this kind of story making an interesting film, in the vein of something like Punch Drunk Love or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
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