Krishna
The misspelling in the title is intentional, as you can see from the different colouring of the ‘Y’. The movie version adopted this too.
Coauthored with Quincy Troupe, who is a Professor of Literature in LA University and so you know who gave the polished words in the story, without either authors mentioning anything. So, the gripe I am about to give is doubly annoying, The wordsmith could have steered Chris away from the tonal issues in this otherwise interesting story but did not.
I had very mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, it is a deeply inspiring story. The story of a man who was deeply disadvantaged and felt the pressures of being who he is both in pecuniary terms and in racial terms overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds to achieve his dream pursuing a single purpose, with passion and determination. The story is also told in an accessible style so it is easy to follow along. Equating money and comfort with happ(y)ness may make you wonder, but that is the basis of most people’s definition of success and therefore happiness.
At another level it is fairly irritating. As I described in the Life of Pi, the overly sunny ‘Everyone is good; you can get from anywhere to anywhere; every moment in life taught me lessons’ tone grates a bit. The greatly self congratulatory tone of everything around him rings too pat. What is missing is the sense of reading about a life lived through its triumphs and frustrations, the struggle against oppressive challenges in life, the sense of self doubt that must surely have been there at times like this – none of this shows through.
My mom made serial mistakes in relationships and had to give away my sister and me to a foster care but she did come over there to make the candy I liked best and smiled at me so that I knew that she must be my mother – these kind of descriptions really make it look like a bowdlerized, fairy tale version of an interesting life at its core.
We admire his ambition, and his rise through homelessness to riches beyond what most people, more privileged, achieve in life. We start with stories that shaped his life. His mom told him he can be a millionaire if he wanted to; a man in a Red Ferrari told him that he was a stockbroker. These two seminal incidents shaped his life. (There you have another example of a distempered tale).
The tone surprised me. I expected something like Angela’s Ashes, a brutally honest tale told with humour amid devastating hardship. The parallels are there: a poor household, an unfit father (stepfather here, violent and drunk here as opposed to irresponsible and drunk there) but the tone could not be more different. Especially since this became a talked-about movie (I have not seen that one) I expected some immersive experience. What I got was justification on why the mom was absolutely pure and loving, even after subjecting the kids to the series of stepfathers, leaving them off with relatives and how well he has done at school, in growing up, how wonderfully he has come up. An example : In reading the Red Balloon during childhood, which he loved, he did not realize ‘that the city was Paris and that he would visit it several times in the future. To me, it spoils the effect that is building up. (My mind translates it as : Look at me, I am so smart. Even though I can only read about it now, please take note that I am going to grow rich and visit the place not once but multiple times.)
Once you get over the simplistic terminology and the pats on the back, the story opens up a world for you with some interesting characters. The constantly uncertain life of Chirs and Ophelia, the changes in location forced on them by circumstances, the violence from the stepfather always in the background, the disappearance of the mother to prison and the various relatives – with their own foibles – with whom they are forced to move in, all of these are brought out in interesting details. Also the casual openness of Chris to his difficult past comes through clearly – though you realize that was the entire purpose of the book.
It is thus a mixed bag.
The theft of electronics by Chris along with his friends, it being stolen due to his own stupidity and his rape while getting part of it back, are all shocking. This is perhaps the one place where the book leaves the cycle of abuse by Frank and missteps by Chris and moves a bit in another direction.
He joins the Navy but is posted only within the US, much to his chagrin. But he learns to help in the Navy hospital and earns the respect of many medics. When he is done with the duty, he is invited to join the clinic of one of the doctors and learns more about medicine.
The book is surprising in that it shows the multifaceted side of Chris Gardner – for instance his expertise as a surgeon’s assistant and his role in training interns, not to mention his publishing of papers as a co-author with some prominent surgeons. Through all this, I wish the tone was a little bit less pompous as in ‘Even many Harvard graduates cannot boast of having published so many papers’. His eventual rise in the financial industry is another cap in his feather.
He tracks his biological father and goes to meet him in Louisiana. His father’s family is welcoming and he learns that his father has been receiving abandoned sons almost every four years for a while now from different women.
He then gets his calling when he sees an investment broker and learns of the fabulous money they make. He is determined to make it in finance. The book has some interesting pieces here where he survives by staying with a pastor who helps the homeless by night and drumming up clients by day. Even here he cannot resist the boast about how he helped the pastor later, after his success, to the tune of millions of dollars.
The ending is slow and still with some remnants of interest. The example of JR and how he endured racist jokes on the phone and dumbfounded him when he met the client for the first time is interesting. How he saved the account is even more interesting – except for his naive belief that since JR stopped telling nigger jokes to him (though maintaining jewish and spiv jokes) he is not ‘OK with black brothers’. Yeah, right.
The self congratulatory tone continues – how he was able to buy expensive belts (later guilt free) and how he bought not one but multiple Ferraris and so on and so on.
Don’t get me wrong – his achievements are genuinely remarkable and inspiring. His narration – despite the ghost writing help he got – is not.
5/10
= = Krishna