Get Me Out of Here is a entertaining little romp about a very un-fun guy. Matt Freeman is a Londoner ostensibly living the high life in 2008. He brags about expensive clothes, hot girls and a fab job that takes him around the globe and pays for a swank lifestyle. Problem is, very little of what he says is true.
Oh sure, there's a bird or two, but they seem to, well, exit his life very abruptly. And the clothes? The flat? The restaurants? They all seem to be stolen, or appropriated, or enjoyed on someone else's nickel. The book opens with Matt ruminating about a ruined pair of glasses, and this monologue, referencing expensive designers and Matt's own very fussy taste, is repeated many times in different guises throughout the book, whenever Matt needs to distract himself, or the reader, from what's really going on in his life. Normally I dislike name-dropping brands in novels as lazy shorthand on the part of the writer but it's important to understand what all this blather and noise tells about Matt's personality and the reality of his life. He's trying to say, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, but with a narrator as wily as Matt, that's where all the fun is.
Little by little, it all comes apart. When I started the book, it read to me like a confession; I expected the book to have been written, Humbert Humbert style, in prison after he finally gets his comeuppance. I'm not going to tell you whether or not I was right, but if you like highly stylized literary pop fic crossed with social satire and told by the most unreliable narcissist this side of Nabokov, what I will tell you is to run out and buy this book right now. It's the best time you'll have being horrified all year.
This is book 2 of 14 towards Amante Level! I read it last month. In progress now: The Companion, by Lorcan Roche.
This post is at my book blog here.
FTC Disclosure: I received this book for review from Europa Editions.
