Gather the Weeds in fiction files redux

Apr 05, 2009 Brian rated it really liked it

Shelves: read-2009

Intense... just pure concentrated intensity. When I read The Road sometime ago my only comment about it was I thought it too dark and gloomy from page one to the last. Gather the Weeds makes The Road seem like a happy little fairy tale with cute bunnies hopping among the daisies while sunbeams twinkle in the crystal air... really.

The weeds are the less fortunate among us... the physically or mentally impaired. The world is a garden. Weeds don't belong in a garden. They're kept in a place called ...more

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Jun 26, 2009 Patrick rated it it was amazing · (Review from the author) · review of another edition

I wrote this book when I was feeling a bit depressed and obsessed with the idea of belonging. I remembered all those high school years and not really fitting in anywhere. I was bad at sports, no confidence in myself, and was very unsocial. The only thing I was good at was telling filthy jokes that make hearing people laugh aloud and hard.

The funny thing was when I wrote this book, I thought to myself, 'Hey I bet this would make a great story,' and at first I wanted to write a novel about a dea ...more

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Sep 08, 2011 Elizabeth rated it really liked it

Experiencing the way a young man's mind expands as everything in his world closes in is something I won't soon forget. This novel challenged my ideas and reframed tired concepts like individual strengths and weaknesses. Congratulations to Mr. Kilgallon. He captures the blade to the grindstone feel of a young man sharpening his awareness in a silent world. ...more

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May 24, 2009 Alex rated it liked it

The premise of Patrick Kilgallon’s novel gather the weeds is solid. The physically and mentally handicapped are being rounded up by authorities of an unnamed state and placed in wards, where they will live and work until the final solution. Guided by the principles of eugenics, something similar to this happened in Nazi Germany in the late 1930s, prior to the Holocaust, and perhaps paved the way for the concentration camps where the Jews and other ethnic groups would be exterminated. Eugenics, a The premise of Patrick Kilgallon’s novel gather the weeds is solid. The physically and mentally handicapped are being rounded up by authorities of an unnamed state and placed in wards, where they will live and work until the final solution. Guided by the principles of eugenics, something similar to this happened in Nazi Germany in the late 1930s, prior to the Holocaust, and perhaps paved the way for the concentration camps where the Jews and other ethnic groups would be exterminated. Eugenics, a mix of Darwinism and pseudo-science, flourished not only in Germany but in England and the United States, where some of its notions for creating a healthier, superior human race, including forced sterilization, were carried out. The circumstances in which Kilgallon’s characters find themselves are not farfetched, and definitely not in need of an alternate universe.

The first 30 or so pages, which introduce the main character, Michael Poole, a deaf 17-year-old, his fellow wards, and the Gate, the compound in which the characters are place, are fairly compelling. The weaving of sign language into the narrative, Michael’s flawed but earnest speech and the bold mix of writing forms (poetry, graffiti, extended footnotes) initially have the texture of experimental fiction. Unfortunately the experiment soon runs out of steam and what follows saps the vitality of those first pages. The writing seems less bold than merely astray.

The great dystopian novels, like 1984 and Brave New World, paint a vivid picture of the society in which the characters are struggling to retain their humanity. In these novels, we get why inhuman things are being done to human beings. Kilgallon tells us almost nothing about the “military-industrial complex” that’s supposed to be behind all this (in fact, though the term is mentioned on the book’s cover, I don’t recall reading it in the text). All we are given is the day to day experiences of Michael and the other wards. Conceivably this sealed immersion into the daily routine could work (Tolstoy’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) if the daily experiences were so horrific, dehumanizing and mind-bending that the everyday becomes the extraordinary. But the experiences of Michael the deaf, Eggy the retard, Sam the epileptic and Paul the wheelchair-bound, play out like the misadventures of bratty kids at a summer camp. They spend most of their time calling each other names, picking or eluding fights and telling dirty jokes—endlessly. Nothing much moves the story forward. Adding to the inertia are devices that work for awhile but drag on the long haul. Michael’s halting speech, for example, and the reactions of others to it, grows tedious. Much of the time, Kilgallon seems intent on making sure we don’t sympathize with his characters, and in that he succeeds. But in the moments when he seems to want us to care (especially the flashbacks), he pours it on so thickly that maudlin is an insufficient label.

All of the above might be surmounted if Kilgallon wasn’t addicted to padding. He’s wordy and imprecise. “His hand rests on the cool knob of the door and turns, the door clicking open.” Why not just, “He opened the door.”? Or “So, alone he wept and wept hard, clean tears from his eyes flowing, nostrils leaving trails of snot on his tattered and tear-stained pillow.” If there are hard clean tears, there must be soft dirty tears, but I can’t conceive of those. Why couldn’t he have just wept instead of wept and wept? And if he’s weeping, what’s the point of “eyes flowing”? Nostrils leaving trails of snot? Ugly and elusive. “Tattered and tear-stained pillow.” Let go of my wrist, Kilgallon.

I’m giving gather the weeds three stars for noble intentions.
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