It was my own personal theory that most lifetimes could be summed up by ten to twenty moments, meaningful snippets ranging from a handful of seconds to a few spins around the clock face that contained both the best and worst of one's character and experiences. Like a home movie on Super 8 film, twenty impactful moments that told the story of a life. Often those moments were first glances, tearful good-byes, fortunate turns, unfortunate accidents, promises kept, promises broken, triumphs, failures, and regrets. In my case, it only took thirteen moments from my forty-three years to convey an insightful understanding of my life, twelve recollections that I told proudly and one that always stung a little bit in the telling.
When author Michael Bowe contacted me and offered to send me a review copy of his self-published sophomore effort, The Weight of a Moment, I first looked to others' reviews, and seeing that they were by and large positive, I accepted his offer; why wouldn't I be pleased to help promote an Indie author who's just looking for some traction? But having now read the book, I'm in a bit of a pickle: I didn't really like it. And while I'm not here to eviscerate the guts of anyone's art, I can only be honest about what I read (and hope the following may be taken constructively?) Overwhelmingly my critique would be that this book needed a cold-blooded editor: to catch the errors; to rein in the excess; to focus the plot. This comes across as more amateur than merely Indie.
I first met Tom Corbett on a sticky July afternoon in The Bashful Rooster around 3pm when there were no other customers in the diner. Finished with my BLT and fries, I noticed Tom sitting alone in a booth on the far side of the restaurant near the tall glass case with fresh cakes and pies on display. I recognized him immediately from the Internet video as the Dream Squasher, but I knew not to mention his notoriety as I strolled toward his booth. Better than most, I knew what it meant to run from yourself and I figured that was the reason he'd come to our little town.Essentially, the plot sees the meeting of two middle-aged men – both running from “weighty moments” that have destroyed their personal and professional lives in the big city – who have returned to the same small Pennsylvania town where they grew up. Although they did not know each other when they were kids (ten years separate their ages), as the pair gets acquainted in the present, their backstories become fully revealed and they help one another to face their pasts and to move on into the future. If you can buy the details – that these particular moments would destroy these men's lives and that they would form an instafriendship that heals all wounds – then you just might enjoy this as a triumph-of-the-spirit friendship story. I couldn't buy into much of it.
As for the particulars of the writing: Perspective shifts between the first person POV of Nick (a former award-winning journalist who continually tells us what a great and insightful writer he is; always a potential minefield in my opinion) and a third person omniscient POV of former art and antique appraiser Tom (which is also narrated by Nick, who couldn't possibly have this omniscient insight into Tom's thoughts and motivations, and especially for all the scenes from the past that he wasn't present for). These weird shifts are just one of my complaints that could have been solved with better editing, but I was also constantly distracted by improper comma and word usages. At least four times, Bowe used “passed” when he meant “past” (which makes that not a typo but a disdain for language) and in the following sampling, that usage is not the only thing cringeworthy:
Well passed the age of backseat fumbling, I thought I understood the act of making love, but this encounter produced a union that exceeded anything I'd experienced before, one that far exceeded the introduction of a penis to a vagina.So, spellcheck and grammarcheck could have eliminated some distractions, but even worse for me was Bowe's constant need to explain things to the reader. A Spanish-speaking housekeeper has her brief foreign language utterances immediately translated in brackets (a device I've never seen before and which turned me off), and Bowe uses the same brackets device to explain a name brand he drops (tinned tobacco), and to expand well-known abbreviations like IED (which would work better if he didn't write “Improvised Explosive Devise”). And worse, Bowe (in the voice of Nick narrating his and Tom's stories to the reader) feels the need to explain ordinary things like: what a viral video is and how “virality” is achieved; what insider trading is and how that works; and perhaps worst of all, what an excavator is and how that works. Okay, worst of all is how Nick and Tom, in the course of fixing up Tom's inherited farmstead, both unearth dinosaur bones and build a guest house, with Nick explaining how the digging in the earth is helping the pair to exhume their own pasts and how erecting the structure is helping them to focus on the future; I really don't think that Bowe trusts his readers to understand anything at all and I was a bit offended.
I really did want to like this book, and I really wanted to give it at least three stars, but I didn't, and I couldn't.
