Keith Yocum is a fellow Cape Codder, and I have had the pleasure to read a number of his books. This one clearly parallels his opening sentence: “Many strange things in life cannot be explained.” This is a kind and gentle book and quite different from his others. For example, what appears to be a dead body in this story, is not dead.
Phillip Preston is a 36-year-old assistant bank manager who lives in a small seaside town and owns a boat. His wife has left him for his best friend. Until the opening event of this story, he is living a well-ordered, predictable, unimaginative life. He doesn’t have ambitions for major improvements in his future - perhaps just something akin to annual cost of living increases if he keeps his head down and does his job faithfully.
His personality is similar to that of William Wilmer in Robert Lawson’s Mr. Wilmer and Anthony Burgess’s (author of A Clockwork Orange) Ambrose in The Eve of Saint Venus, two of my best-book-shelf books. Mr. Wilmer is a mild mannered twenty-nine year old who learns on his twenty-ninth birthday that he can talk to animals.
Ambrose, in Burgess’s book, is a young mechanical engineer who is so nervous about getting married that he practices by putting the ring on the finger of the statue of Venus and the statue promptly closes her hand, making it impossible to remove the ring. Ambrose has effectively married the statue.
In Best You, what happens to Phillip Preston is as unreal as talking to animals or marrying a statue. Perhaps the protagonists in these tales need to be simple, decent people so that what happens to them is a sharp contrast to their every day lives. Perhaps the character has to be simple in order to accept the “willing suspension of disbelief” and to allow that to transfer to the reader.
Frankly, I didn’t want to like the book because I didn’t like the title. It’s simple. It’s not witty, ironic, or clever. I shouldn’t admit that because, as they say, you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover (or its title). But when I got to the end of the book, the title made sense and it fits.
Often a clever and simple premise is difficult to pull off. Difficulties arise that are unexplainable when referencing real life. People can’t actually talk to animals. Statues don’t actually move. And Phillip Preston in Best You can’t relate to what he experiences any more than the reader can. It is a challenge for the author to pull it off without sounding silly or ‘unrealistic’.
Yocum gets close to losing it at times, but is skillfully able to pull it back on track. This is a book worth reading.