Isn't It Pretty To Think So by Nick Miller

Isn't It Pretty To Think So? Nick Miller.  Berkeley: Fernando French Publishing, 2012.  ebook, 995 pps.

Isn't It Pretty To Think So? is a coming of age novel by Nick Miller and appears to be his first.  It is somewhat autobiographical and fully reminiscent of the talent of J. D. Salinger but way more entertaining.  There's a lot of screwing in the book.  I think the young women were lucky, although as it turns out the narrator wasn't always so lucky.  There's bits of drugs and partying wildly in the book too, along with a typical misdirected belief that switching to beer and wine fixes someone in the throes of an addiction cycle.  Even so, I would not have it any other way.  There was a television series on for a couple of years that had an accurate understanding of addiction.  Once the character went off to rehab, I tuned out of the series.  Somehow I don't want the protagonists to be too good or too healthy.  It is obvious to me also that the beliefs of the characters in a novel are not necessarily those of the author.  So I stand by my statement that the way that the narrator was portrayed was far more realistic than if he had sprinted off to rehab.  If he had sprinted off to rehab, I probably would not have finished this book.


The young man in the book being unlucky in love and jobs and stuff like that zooms off and lives here and there until he winds up renting a room in a funky mansion in Los Angeles.  The mansion turns out to be a drug-infested party place much like the one that I lived in during part of my raucous college years.  There is a party daily, a couple of house cleaners who make everything fresh again on Mondays, and an in-house drug dealer.  Replete with the bars and odd folks living in the mansion and in the neighborhood, our twenty-something kid realizes he ain't getting any writing done and splits for someplace else.  

In the new someplace else, he meets his mentor.  His mentor is an older fellow who pretty much gets him to write-- the book in hand coincidentally.  And then there is finally a woman worthy of our budding author and I'm not telling you any more.

sapphoq reviews says:  995 pages was a lot of book and yet I enjoyed every hormone-laden, angst-swimming, love lost and found minute.  Very accessible to all except those who have no business reading books for older readers and those who object to cussing and sex and want us to care that they do.  Folks if you are so fractured that you cannot deal with a few f-bombs in print or the horniness of youth, you probably should not be reading this particular blog.  If you enjoyed Catcher in the Rye once upon a time when you were young, or you know that Hemmingway had a couple of series of e.c.t. treatments, then you are bound to like this rollicking rocking book with a bit of a serious side to it albeit no mental hospitals.  So yeah, get this book and settle in for a long read.  Highly recommended.