" Lulu has all the makings of a good book. It's a complexly woven and somewhat original love-and-loss tale with emotion-inducing characters told by a seemingly warm and friendly narrator named Will. Unfortunately, as things progress, the author amasses more and more of the makings of a bad book. Awkward turns of phrase, cliched plot-turns, and even bouts of just plain boring filler. Things are more or less OK until Part Two (of two), when Lulu sort of disappears and leaves Will to fend for himself as the book's protagonist. This is of course a symbolic move by the author to show that Will is weak and unable to define himself without Lulu, but what we soon learn is that Will is actually an asshole, with very few redeeming qualities, which is bad news for a narrator/protagonist. He's immature and self-serving and completely wayward, and when Evison spends pages and pages describing a pick-up basketball game featuring Will and his brothers against three black kids (a chapter Evison calls "Brothers Against Brothers" -- am I wrong in interpreting this as vaguely racist?) or his landlord's starting a hot dog stand you start to wonder why you're still reading. Also awkward is the decision to describe Will as a nascent philosopher, since this doesn't REALLY go anywhere aside from a few impotent quips about the nature of truth and the meaning of life. How Evison does it, however, is even weirder, and pretty lazy -- instead of describing Will in school, he simply tosses in Will's purported papers on Descartes and the like. There's some really cringe-inducing stuff here, including the professor's comments, which come at the end of the paper, and, just in general, the obviously cringe-inducing stuff you'd expect to find in a junior college student's page-long paper on Descartes. But Will is supposed to be smart -- everyone's always telling him how clever and how quick he is, so something doesn't really add up. You don't feel sorry for him, because he's a selfish, wayward, and immature asshole, and you don't care about his job at the hot dog stand or his RX-7 or, really, anything. Also, Evison for some reason feels the need to constantly name drop restaurants, street corners, concert venues, and bars in both Seattle and Los Angeles. I'm very familiar with both cities, and this didn't add anything for me -- not authenticity, not realism. Just distraction, like a hot girl with a facial tic.
Again, there's a lot of pathos here, and the book isn't a complete waste. It's got a lot going for it, and I did enjoy reading it. With a more exacting or demanding editor at perhaps a larger publishing house, this may have been a better novel. Evison has a really big heart for his characters, and you can tell he put himself into Lulu. Aside from the philosophy papers, it's rarely lazy or underdeveloped. It's just got that feel of the first several chapters having been workshopped quite a bit and the latter parts being left to simply waver and flop about in the wind. Too many times I was torn away from the otherwise intriguing narrative by poor diction or overt and miserably failed cleverness. Worth a read on the beach in the summer, perhaps. If only for the cover, which I think is really stunning, if a bit of a Nabokov cop. Especially when considering the title. Will definitely check out Evison's next novel. "
— Paul, 2/1/2014