This book was odd, it wasn't bad. It was like nothing else I can think of. ( )

This guy writes really well. I was continually impressed with his images. Things like "When I knocked on the door, she opened it looking like I'd wakened her from a dream of falling."

After 20 pages I almost abandoned it, because it wasn't suspenseful enough for me. But I decided to continue, and enjoyed up until the last 10%, at which point it fizzled out. ( )

The Enthusiast is about Henry Bay, a young man who writes for all those little magazines you see on the shelf and can't quite believe they exist: Kite Buggy, Crochet World, Spelunk, Ice Climbing, Cozy: The Magazine of Tea. Over the course of ten years, Henry goes from town to town, job to job, magazine to magazine, searching for his place in the world through the lives of others, enthusiasts of one sort or another, people dedicated to the pursuit of excellence in an obscure field.

Mr. Haas describes The Enthusiast as a classic American Picaresque novel in which the hero goes through a series of comic adventures only to find out he's in a Bildungsroman after all, and will have to grow up in the end. Some of the scenes in the book are very funny. In one chapter Henry must ask an angry model builder on his way to a convention to share a ride with two expert skateboarders on their way to an exhibition event. The model builder rants about a rival modeler who is using his skills with decals to produce illegal parking permits. The skateboarders support him in his justified outrage, so much so that they join him at the model builder convention to confront the wayward modeler. Dude!

Things turn very serious in the final third of the novel when a family member suffers a life-threatening injury, and Henry must confront his life and grow up at last. He finally has to select something that he will become an enthusiast about. ( )