Lunatics

           

    So the rundown is as follows: Lunatics is a funny if profane and sometimes excessively juvenile book. The dialogue and characters shine through, and when the book hits its comic rhythm, the beats come faster than anything I've read. It's hilarious in the right places, and even when the notes don't hit, it keeps up the pace fast enough that it doesn't really matter that the joke flopped. The book's already on to the next one. While Dave Barry has always been weaker in his fiction as opposed to his nonfiction, Alan Zweibel manages to shore him up just enough to carry the day. 

                The drawbacks are that the book occasionally moves too fast, which left me mulling over previous details before I had time to process the next ones, and a lack of enough sympathetic characters to go around. Where both characters attempt being unsympathetic, only one of them actually pulls it off, leaving one feeling a little lopsided, since Philip Horkman (one of the two point-of-view protagonists) is actually kind of a nice person having a successive series of bad days, while Jeffrey Peckerman (the other protagonist) openly uses racist and offensive language the way I use commas and footnotes. Still, in the end, the alternating points of view provide an interesting look at the story of two men continually in over their head. More, as always, below.