A Calling for Charlie Barnes by Joshua Ferris

If you’re looking for a book that offers a heart-warming chuckle over the holidays, please don’t read “A Calling for Charlie Barnes,” Joshua Ferris’s new novel.

On the other hand, if a well-written, yet slightly incoherent story about a fellow who may or may not have pancreatic cancer sounds like a must-read, then by all means go for it.

I’ve always liked Ferris’s work. “Then We Came to the End” about the death of an ad agency was brilliant and personally meaningful. His blunt, New York-y pieces in Esquire are always fun to read.

I regret to say I am not quite so enamored of “Charlie Barnes” because a) after a couple hundred pages I still didn’t understand what his calling was b) the POV shifts from character to character without warning and c) the characters in the book criticize the book the protagonist has just written about them, which is the book you’re reading. Is this what they mean by “meta?”

Charlie also accumulated five wives over the course of the novel, each of whom divorces him after they find out he’s been messing around on the side. It’s a bit like watching the Larry David character in “Curb Your Enthusiasm” minus the humor.

In short, it’s your call as to whether you take the plunge and read this book. Should you vote “yay,” perhaps then you can explain to me how a 90-year-old character is able to have a 103-year-old mother. (I must’ve skipped that class in health ed.)