Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I’ve read about a quarter of this so-called psychological thriller and I’m stopping, grateful that I paid no money for it since I obtained it through Amazon’s First Reads program. “Infinite” is an uber-melodramatic, badly written story told in the first person by a narcissistic protagonist with serious anger issues who thinks that everything bad that’s happened around him is his fault. I found the MC neither likeable nor sympathetic; and I thought many of his actions and reactions incredible. In short, I found it tough to care about what happened to him and most important, not wanting to spend any more time with him. Especially since his story is told in such an awkward and clunky manner. Wordy and often illogical or contradictory, the novel is filled with “writerly” imagery that actually detracts from the story’s immediacy and credibility. For example, the novel begins with the MC naked except for a blanket in a police station being interviewed about the car accident into a river that just drowned his wife and nearly killed him. Yet he takes time to notice that the powdered doughnut the cop is eating leaves “a dusting of sugar on his mustache like fresh snow on a lawn.” And that’s just the first paragraph. Later descriptions—e.g., a woman’s eyes as a “sad country-song kind of blue;” and the MC as breathing “in and out like a piston”—left this reader sighing at almost every page. The author’s/MC’s repeatedly addressing the reader directly was equally annoying. And the story itself is just so unbelievable and contrived. Within the first 50 pages we’re told of two fatal car accidents, a murder-suicide, a second suicide, a variety of other violent altercations, a drinking problem and self-destructive behavior—not to mention a doppelganger supposedly from an alternative universe explained by a theory of quantum physics featured—the author is pleased to remind us—in television’s “The Big Bang Theory.” I like Sheldon, Leonard, Penny, et al. as well as the next person, but to cite the show an authority, or even reference it, did not make me feel as if I was in good hands as a reader. And there are continuity problems—things that just don’t make sense. The MC is a banquet manager at a high-end hotel. After the accident and loss of his wife, he stays in a room at that hotel, drinking himself into a rage so severe that he smashes a glass and then grinds the shards into his palms. And yet the next day, he shows up for work and no one notices a thing—not a cut, not a bandage, nothing. Like I said: glad I didn’t pay for this one.