![]() ![]() ![]() When we first meet Charlie Barnes, it’s 2008, and the stock market is crashing. The narrator is Charlie’s son Jake (his name a nod to Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises”), who claims he’s writing an accurate account of his father’s life, “sticking to the facts.” But in attempting to do so, he finds that facts often don’t reflect people’s version of reality. ![]() About a third of the way through Joshua Ferris’s new and most autobiographical novel “ A Calling for Charlie Barnes,” the narrator addresses the reader regarding the book’s eponymous subject: “I hate to think that you might be losing patience with him because he is failing his best self, or makes a poor ideal for mankind, or simply isn’t worth your time and attention.” I was indeed thinking this about Charlie Barnes, but Ferris writes with an exuberant style that propels the reader, regardless of the plot.
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