The Walk by Richard Paul Evans

The Walk
by Richard Paul Evans
Pub. Date: April 2010
Genre: Fiction
Pages: 289pp

Synopsis:
"My name is Alan Christoffersen. You don’t know me. ‘Just another book in the library,’ my father would say. ‘Unopened and unread.’ You have no idea how far I’ve come or what I’ve lost. More important, you have no idea what I’ve found." —Prologue

What would you do if you lost everything—your job, your home, and the love of your life—all at the same time? When it happens to Seattle ad executive Alan Christoffersen, he’s tempted by his darkest thoughts. A bottle of pills in his hand and nothing left to live for, he plans to end his misery. Instead, he decides to take a walk. But not any ordinary walk. Taking with him only the barest of essentials, Al leaves behind all that he’s known and heads for the farthest point on his map: Key West, Florida. The people he encounters along the way, and the lessons they share with him, will save his life—and inspire yours.

Why I Picked It:
My sister passes to me all the books she finishes so I can post them on Paperbackswap where they are immediately snatched up. This was one of the ones in a more recent batch, and since I'm nowhere close to meeting my 50 Books Read goal for 2010, I decided I needed a quick read.

My Review:
I'm generally opposed to books like this. I don't like Fluff. I tend to steer away from the "feel good, warm-fuzzy" type of books. I also don't like the typical mysteries by Mary Higgins Clark or James Patterson, just because I find them predictable. I'm sort of a book snob. I totally admit that. Not that I want to be reading things like Dostoevsky, but 95% of the time, I like books with a little bit of a dark side, gritty, deep, smart. Anyway.

I say that so that I can start picking on it. It starts off with a broken man, professing to have loved and lost. Each chapter begins with a profound quote, either by himself or someone else equally brilliant, like Kierkegaard or Lewis Carroll. In Chapter Two he completely blows it. His main character, Alan, professes a crush on Elizabeth Montgomery from Bewitched. Then, it says he graduated college in 1998. Am I supposed to buy that? Did he spend a lot of time watching Nick at Nite and fall in love with her there? And later in the chapter, Alan and his best friend McKale are arguing over where the Beatles would've been without Yoko... You trying to tell me that kids who graduated high school in 1994 were bickering about the Beatles? Where was his editor in this process? Ugh. I work really hard to dislike these kinds of books, and RPE is making it too easy on me. By the end of Chapter Two, I became convinced that a teenage girl wrote the dialogue, the foreshadowing was too simple, and man, I better not have a weak moment and start crying by the end of this thing (which is apparently part of a new series he is writing. Oh Joy. More to come.)

Okay, okay, I know I'm being harsh. Having said all that, I did allow myself to enjoy the easy pacing and spent an hour of naptime today quickly flipping the pages, completely sucked in partly by the tragic and sad story, but mostly because I could see that I might actually finish another book - today! As Alan embarked on his walk, though, I started to skim pages. All the details about 5 miles later there was a shack with a steeple on top, and then it rained, and then... Small town details that made me start to wonder of RPE had been on a cross country road trip and took notes which he then threw verbatim into the book. I'm assuming he must have. Maybe I should pull out a map to see if anything in the book matches reality.

I just enjoy personal interactions more than talking about how many gas stations he walked past, and the details of every meal he ate, you know? It gets a little interesting again when he meets an overly trusting life-loving, inspiring woman along the way... Seriously too trusting -- going to his hotel room to bring him dinner after serving him lunch? Who does that??

Near the end, I found what might be my favorite line from the book, "Frankly, it doesn't matter to me if you don't believe that this really happened, just so long as you believe that I do." Cool, I'm off the hook.

I understand that death and grief are hard emotions to put down on paper. In my opinion, RPE didn't even try. He brushed right over it. Fundamentally, there is nothing wrong with this book. It's entirely too simplistic, very idealistic. Alan simply tells his assistant to sell all his belongings, put the money in a bank account and leaves. In one conversation he has, Alan starts yelling which could have been a very powerful scene, but the way it was written seemed very unnatural, really weird - maybe with a better developed dialogue, it would've made more sense. It's just too surface. Everything feels like it's right on the surface, like someone brushing over the quick details because there isn't enough time to really get into it. The storyline in the hands of a more skilled, perhaps more patient author could've been developed into something much more authentic.

I tried to convey from the start that I'm not a huge fan of these sorts of books. In the midst and aftermath of tragedy as it was presented, I'm not really convinced that Alan, the Alan we were told about, would've actually set out on a cross-country walk. I also know that a house does not go into foreclosure after just one month, forcing him to have to leave. Too many happy coincidences are happening to Alan, with one exception, and he only crosses paths with enlightened charitable people. I wish I could just suspend my disbelief and run with it, but I just roll my eyes. I'm sure RPE will do just fine with this book series without me. If my sister hands me Book 2 to post, I will probably read it. And I'll tear it apart right here.