Chris Poirier's Review of The Tom Drake Experience
Last updated: September 6, 2008
A serious character study
Tom Drake is deeply insecure. He hates all that he was. He wishes to be someone else.
It isn’t often that I find myself disagreeing with Grace’s reviews, but on The Tom Drake Experience, I totally do. I’m not going to go so far as to say it’s brilliant, but, to date, at Chapter 24, I think it’s pretty damned good.
This is a story that builds slowly. It starts as shallow as a puddle, and every chapter, pours in more rain. It’s a character study, of a man who can’t stand the weakness he came from, who can’t see any value in what the struggle gave to him, who is so desperate to be somebody — as measured by external standards — that he spends every waking moment trying to kill off and bury every little piece of who he was, so that he can erect in his place a facade he thinks everyone will adore.
But old self dies hard, and new self can’t stand without its foundation.
The writing in Tom Drake is crisp, at times beautiful. At a glance, I might have said the first half-dozen chapters are considerably more described than I like, but, reading it . . . I realize that all that description is characterization. This is how he wants to see himself. This is how he wants to define himself — by how other people see him.
The Tom Drake Experience is one of those stories where you have to look beneath the surface, beneath what it obviously is, to what it actually is. And my sense, at this moment, is that what it actually is will be heart-breaking when it is done. Because, for all his shallowness, for all his grasping, for all his disdain, Tom Drake is a character I’m finding myself caring about, more and more. And I can’t think things are going to end well for him.
To those of you who like a good character study, who like subtle, careful writing, I wholeheartedly recommend The Tom Drake Experience.
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