Ani Katz - A Good Man

Rating: 2/5

Review:
A struggle

I’m afraid I struggled with A Good Man. It’s a bold idea and Ani Katz certainly writes well, but I got very bogged down in a slow, oppressive narrative.

The book is narrated in the first person by Thomas, a man with an apparently idyllic family life with his wife and daughter and a successful career. We can tell that something dreadful is looming, but it takes a very long time indeed for anything approaching an event to occur. Thomas’s narration is plainly unreliable – and very well done, to be fair – and through his eyes and interpretation we get a lot of history of his marriage and of his rather creepily dysfunctional mother and sisters as he becomes increasingly disturbed by things in his life. The trouble is that for me it just went on and on being oppressive and foreboding with little to really draw me in and, frankly, I found it a real struggle after a while. As a result, I’m not sure I really learned much about what Katz is really trying to tell us.

I applaud the book’s ambition, I think Ani Katz is a good writer and others have plainly derived far more from A Good Man than I did, but personally I couldn’t really get on with it.

(My thanks to Random House for an ARC via NetGalley.)