Understudies (Audible Audio Edition) Ravi Mangla Daniel Penz Books
Download As PDF : Understudies (Audible Audio Edition) Ravi Mangla Daniel Penz Books
A high school teacher begins to question the course of his life after a famous young actress moves into town. In the starlet's shadow, his girlfriend, his mother, his neighbor, and his students take on strange new dimensions. Told in a series of snapshots, Understudies presents a sharp, funny, and heartbreaking study of beauty, celebrity, and everyday needs.
Understudies (Audible Audio Edition) Ravi Mangla Daniel Penz Books
'Understudies' is an interesting look into a typical/atypical suburban life of a man, his girlfriend, mother, friends, and underage band mates. It's filled with the type of situations that riff on the existential absurdity of suburban life - finding hilarity in bored mediocrity, kind of like Fargo or Twin Peaks, and like these two examples is tinged with dark humor. Unexplained obsessions, contradictory logic, and observations of human foibles abound in the characters as they live - not grow or change much, just live. At times, the dry humor is taken to the kind of extreme where it could chafe on someone not fully on board with Mangla's sensibilities, but the bite-sized sections keep the reading light and unencumbered. At it's best, it resembles the irreverent mocking of mediocrity that George Saunders often uses, as well as Amelia Gray's 'Threats', although that example would be the characters of this book thrown into a nightmare dimension. Unlike these examples, 'Understudies' has a much more lukewarm tale to tell. Even though the story is resolved simply enough, it feels like there is an absence of extremes for any of the characters, and that negative space feels like it could have been filled by some sinister or upsetting resolutions. As it stands, the book is much like characters themselves: quirky, dry, and comical, but quick to pull back before any roots could be set down.Product details
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Understudies (Audible Audio Edition) Ravi Mangla Daniel Penz Books Reviews
I like short. I like concise. I like books that don't over-detail every setting, every character, every emotion and instead leave room for the reader to get involved. So it's not unexpected that I liked Ravi Mangla's book, Understudies.
This is a short novel broken into 200 bite-sized chapters and the end result is something of a meditation or a mood piece. The narrative covers the entire (but mostly recent) life of a high school teacher and his relationship with his girlfriend, mother, work colleague, rock band, and a neighbor who is obsessed with a famous actress who has moved to their suburb.
The many brief windows that open on the life of the unnamed narrator serve to show a man confronted by an often mystifying world. There are moments of humor throughout, but they are suppressed somehow, as if overly-medicated. To illustrate a life in snippet form like this is perhaps the most honest way. It is, after all, how life is experienced randomly, largely without plot and navigated with maps as useless as the one sold by one of the characters who insists that squiggly lines and unnamed streets is enough. Rather than challenge the assumptions and opinions of people like this, the narrator tends to just accept and move on. It's as if he expects life to be strange (and it rarely fails to deliver) and he suspects that none of this may be real to begin with. If that's the case, why struggle?
The writing is lovely and delicate, with lots of pithy and amusing observations about our culture. Think Infinite Jest in digestible portions, and with fewer characters. I think this book more or less says the same thing, although Mangla does not struggle as Wallace does to find a way out of the shallow and dissociated lives we lead. It's more a view of ourselves in snapshots. But some sections are galvanizing.
There's a term for this type of novel, in which a story is told through a series of anecdotes that may not initially seem connected but that eventually build to a 3D story.--Oh, yeah, segmented fiction. Anyway, think Jenny Offil. In Understudies, the sections are distinctly set apart (and are very short), whereas in Dept of Speculation, each paragraph is its own bit and you end up seeing the story through a kaleidoscope. But similar concept. So, I thought of Wallace and also Saramago (The Double) for the fascination with the actress (and in the case of both Mangla and Wallace, what she represents about us). (Also the relationship with the teacher colleague recalled the Saramago for me.)
Fantastic book!
What a funny, insightful, and touching little book! (And I mean "little" not in a derogatory sense—Understudies is billed as a "short novel," and it's just a little more than 120 or so pages.)
Our somewhat jaded (and unnamed) narrator is a high school teacher. Or, in his words, "It could be said I worked as a purveyor of worldly knowledge, a molder of young minds...It could also be said I supervised the next generation of disappointers in the intervening hours between bus rides." His life—and the lives of those around him—are changed when a Golden Globe-winning actress moves into his town.
His bizarre best friend Chudley becomes obsessed with the actress, and the narrator begins to worry that this obsession may cause Chudley to do something inappropriate. But what he doesn't realize is he is becoming increasingly focused on the actress' presence as well. But he's unable to ascertain whether he's actually interested in her, or if he's just using her as a distraction from his unsettled personal life, as his live-in girlfriend, Missy, is pressuring him for more permanence in their relationship.
As he tries to make sense of his life, and of his mother's new role as an advice columnist on the web (despite her own phobias), he finds himself hanging out with a group of high school students, including one of his own students, and they form a band, which reawakens his zeal to perform. And strangely, these high school students—even when stoned—are more insightful than he is about life.
Understudies is a humorous and moving story told in vignettes about a man in the throes of a mid-life crisis before he hits mid-life. But in addition, it's a commentary about our fame- and celebrity-obsessed culture, and how we find ourselves following the latest trends and searching for solutions to our problems anywhere we can find it. It's also a story about the need to feel loved and needed, to feel secure.
Ravi Mangla is a terrific writer. He has a great sense of humor, which was definitely reflected in so much of this book. Many sentences made me chuckle. And even as you shook your head at the ludicrousness of some of the situations and characters (including a student named Cuisinart), you realize that underneath all of the satire, it's a story that seems familiar and realistic. I look forward to seeing what's in store for Mangla's literary career.
'Understudies' is an interesting look into a typical/atypical suburban life of a man, his girlfriend, mother, friends, and underage band mates. It's filled with the type of situations that riff on the existential absurdity of suburban life - finding hilarity in bored mediocrity, kind of like Fargo or Twin Peaks, and like these two examples is tinged with dark humor. Unexplained obsessions, contradictory logic, and observations of human foibles abound in the characters as they live - not grow or change much, just live. At times, the dry humor is taken to the kind of extreme where it could chafe on someone not fully on board with Mangla's sensibilities, but the bite-sized sections keep the reading light and unencumbered. At it's best, it resembles the irreverent mocking of mediocrity that George Saunders often uses, as well as Amelia Gray's 'Threats', although that example would be the characters of this book thrown into a nightmare dimension. Unlike these examples, 'Understudies' has a much more lukewarm tale to tell. Even though the story is resolved simply enough, it feels like there is an absence of extremes for any of the characters, and that negative space feels like it could have been filled by some sinister or upsetting resolutions. As it stands, the book is much like characters themselves quirky, dry, and comical, but quick to pull back before any roots could be set down.
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