Very slow. Made a better movie. Check it out on Netflix and save yourself the hours of tedium with this book.

[A Note: I've marked this with a spoiler because at times it refers to things which happen quite far along in the book, but any actual spoilers and specifics have been put in tags].

 

I have a particular pet hate about books: I really hate misleading blurbs.

 

I hate blurbs which make really good literary books sound like chick-lit due to the author being female; it often means great books end up with a lot of negative reviews. See the Goodreads page of Joanna Kavenna's Inglorious for a good example. It won the Orange Award for New Writers but one edition had a fucking ceramic dog figurine on the front.

 

I also hate blurbs which tell you what happens in the book more than 15-20% of the way through.

 

The blurb for The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving tells us that Benjamin Benjamin and his charge Trevor, a 19 year-old with MD, travel across America to see Trev's dad.

 

They set off at around 47%.

 

Happily, the preceding hundred or so pages are spent showing us what kind of person our narrator is while very, very slowly trying to build up tension about the exact circumstances in which his kids died. Unfortunately, he's a casual misogynist who needs to spend some time googling Schroedinger's Rapist. If it made a difference to the story in some way, great, no problem, but I didn't feel it did. If it had felt deliberate, again, great, no problem, but this didn't.

 

At one point I was ready to put it down unfinished: Ben stalks a woman he went on a date with (he was supposed to go out and get laid - the assumption is she's fine with that) to her place of work and then mentally calls her a bitch because she - having previously signalled her disinterest in him - arranges for a colleague to serve him.

 

But, people like this exist. Lots of them. And having one exist in fiction is not a bad thing any more than having serial killers and paedophiles is, it's just not what I want to read. The bad thing was that after those first hundred pages *poof*, he's no longer like that. And maybe you could argue this was his character arc, that he was redeemed by the decision to take Trev to visit his dad and by the hours spent in a car with the Spiritually Noble White Trash Girl - (c)The Ghost Of Charles Dickens - but actually what happens is that they spend some time in a car together and he isn't the jerk he previously was. Maybe she farts sedatives.

 

At times an adventurous road novel and others an examination of what it means to be crippled (both in terms of physical disability as well as being stuck in a rut with life), The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving displays Jonathan Evison's ability to weave together different elements into a complex and readable whole. Benjamin Benjamin is stuck: he Facebook stalks his soon to be ex-wife (if he ever agrees to sign the paperwork), has lost his job, and goes back to retrain as a caregiver. After a fairly basic course, his hope at getting his life back together lies with Trevor, a nineteen year old with a particularly crippling form of muscular dystrophy. He is not able to tie his own shoes or go to the bathroom on his own, both crippling to the psyche of this late teen male, whose two goals are to become more independent of his mother and also talk as much about dirty sex as he is able to with Ben. Trev has some emotional baggage as well, since his father decides to show up only after Trev has taken a turn for the worse. Trev takes Ben on a road trip to visit the father (who himself gets into an accident) in an old van, capable of accommodating Trev's physical impairments. The cast of characters that Ben and Trev encounter is staggering, from a runaway, a man who looks like a skinned weasel, his very pregnant girlfriend, and a man in a car who appears to be following them. These characters at times act as exaggerated versions of themselves, but when confronted with major life issues they show a surprising depth. The road trip, while it forms only the latter half of the novel, is a way for Ben and Trev both to work out their issues. Ben recounts this trip as well as alternating with another one he took years ago with his wife and two children, fleshing out Ben's character in a heart-wrenching way. While less complex (read: shorter) than [b:West of Here|7865197|West of Here|Jonathan Evison|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1295568021s/7865197.jpg|11025005], Evison is again back with the quirky characters of the Pacific Northwest but with the same emotional depth.

Heartbreaking. Uplifting. Characters I want to find in real life to see what they are doing now. So good. Just read it. You won't be disappointed.

Review first published on my blog: http://memoriesfrombooks.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-revised-fundamentals-of-caregiving.html

The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving is a story about living life in spite of its challenges and difficulties. Trevor is a nineteen year old who suffers from a form of muscular dystrophy. He is very limited in his physical abilities. Ben is living with the aftermath of tragedy in his life. He has lost his family and his job. The tragic event that led to this overwhelms every aspect of his life.

Ben takes a night class in the "fundamentals of caregiving". He learns how to provide at home care for patients in a removed, professional manner. Trevor is his first client. As their relationship progresses, the professional boundaries are blurred. Ben and Trevor embark on a grand adventure and learn that peace and joy in life are possible despite the challenges it presents.

I wanted to like this book. I felt sorry for both Ben and Trevor. Unfortunately, I found myself not getting involved with the characters or their story. The sadness I felt for them was a removed, distanced one. The characters did not come to life for me and did not pull me into the story.

Some of the incidents that take place are amusing. The message about overcoming adversity is a positive one. However, the characters evoke sadness but not caring. That finally was what made the book not successful for me.

*** Reviewed for LibraryThing Early Reviewers program ***