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Book Reviewed by:Woke Up Lonely is an original and deeply funny novel that explores our very human impulse to seek and repel intimacy with the people who matter to us most.
Thurlow Dan is the founder of the Helix, a cult that promises to cure loneliness in the twenty-first century. With its communes and speed-dating, mixers and confession sessions, the Helix has become a national phenomenon - and attracted the attention of governments worldwide. But Thurlow, camped out in his Cincinnati headquarters, is lonely - for his ex-wife, Esme, and their daughter, whom he hasn't seen in ten years.
Esme, for her part, is a covert agent who has spent her life spying on Thurlow, mostly to protect him from the law. Now, with her superiors demanding results, she recruits four misfits to botch a reconnaissance mission in Cincinnati. But when Thurlow takes them hostage, he ignites a siege of the Helix House that will change all their lives forever.
With fiery, exuberant prose, Fiona Maazel takes us on a wild ride through North Korea's guarded interior and a city of vice beneath Cincinnati, a ride that twists and turns as it delves into an unsettled, off-kilter America. Woke Up Lonely is an original and deeply funny novel that explores our very human impulse to seek and repel intimacy with the people who matter to us most.
There are a few writers I love, and gorge on, simply for their writing; they could spend eleven pages describing a teacup and I'd be on board, salivating for more. The list is short: David Foster Wallace, Gertrude Stein, Cintra Wilson. And now: Fiona Maazel. I would go anywhere with Maazel. Whether you're as enchanted by her language as I am or not (though I promise, she will enchant you), Woke Up Lonely is a spectacular novel. You must read it...continued
Full Review
(934 words)
(Reviewed by Morgan Macgregor).
In book reviews for Woke Up Lonely, Scientology is often invoked as a cultural reference for the Helix. The reasons for this are clear enough: both are worldwide organizations committed to individual and social change, both are led by one man who claims to have the secret to happiness, and both are largely suspected, by outsiders, to be cults (the Church of Scientology has been riddled with controversy with former members claiming to have been incarcerated extensively).
The primary "truth" upon which Scientology is constructed is this:
"Man is a spiritual being endowed with abilities well beyond those which he normally envisions. He is not only able to solve his own problems, accomplish his goals and gain lasting happiness, but he can ...
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He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming
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Heidi Julavits, author of The Vanishers
Woke Up Lonely is the novel equivalent of a sonic boom - it builds, it explodes, it leaves your ears, mind, and soul ringing for days. Who else writes sentences like this, who else writes sound art prose that transports a heart-killing story of human frailty, susceptibility, loyalty, and isolation? No one.
