Lump - Nathan Whitlock - ★★

AUTHOR: Nathan Whitlock

GENRE: Literary Fiction, Satire?

RATING: 2 stars.

In a Nutshell: Could have been outstanding, but messed up big-time in its execution. Such a wasted opportunity! Don’t pick this up if you were expecting a story about a woman battling an emotional breakdown as the blurb promises; the focus is more on the man in her life.

Story Synopsis:

Thirty-eight-year-old Cat is having a heck of a day, and not in a good way. Within a few hours' span, she discovers that she is pregnant, she has cancer, and her husband has done something idiotic. Cat falls apart emotionally and runs away from her home, without telling her husband Donovan or her two young kids or anyone else.

What led to Cat's taking such a drastic decision? How do the people in her life respond?

We learn the above through various third-person perspectives, including that of Cat.

As the blurb focusses on Cat's snapping point after the traumatic events, I expected a strong woman-oriented story about a lady who either fights back against the issues confronting her, or ventures into an introspective reflection of what went wrong. This approach would have made the story brilliant, maybe even making it cross the 4-star mark for me. The initial few pages of the book are a testimony to how amazingly the book could have delivered had it kept the focus on Cat.

Sadly, this didn't happen. What I found instead was a hot mess.

Bookish Yays:

🌹 The book started off very well. The initial few chapters build up the perfect background for Cat and her emotional state.

🌹 Cat’s housemaid Lena is an immigrant, so from her perspective, we get to see a little about immigrant experience in Toronto, where the story is based.

🌹 A few of the sections come from the perspective of Cat’s daughter Isabelle. These were the best in terms of depth and emotions.

Bookish Nays:

🌵 The story begins a few days before the revelations come Cat's way, and ends a few months later. During the interim, we get to hear from Cat, her husband Donovan, her daughter Isabelle, her maid Lena, and one segment from a pet dog's perspective. The shifting points of view mean that we get to see Cat’s emotional conflict only in bits and pieces. When the other characters pick up the narrative baton, their perspective is about the problems *they* are facing than on what’s happening with Cat.

🌵 As mentioned in the blurb and above, one of the character’s we hear from is a dog. This had made me very curious. However, the dog handled the narration for just one chapter, and that was also just about average in execution. What I couldn’t understand was why the dog was given a voice while his owner Meredith, who has a much bigger role to play in the story, never gets a chance to show us her point of view.

🌵 I had expected the major focus to be on Cat. However, to my surprise and utter disappointment, Donovan is the character who is most often on page and who gets the maximum attention, and that too for things absolutely unrelated to Cat’s trauma. This would have been okay if Donovan had any redeeming qualities. Sadly, he is among the most perverted creeps I've read in fiction. His whole perspective, especially his attitude towards women, was infuriating. I would have still enjoyed the book if he had received at least some kind of comeuppance for his behaviour, but that angle is left dangling.

🌵 Because of the writing choice, the only character we truly get to know well is Donovan. The rest of the characters are fit into the book only as per convenience of the storyline. Even for major characters such as Cat, Meredith (the woman who takes Cat in) and Claudia (Cat’s sister), the motivation behind their behaviour is never clarified.

🌵 While the first half was still tolerable, the second half goes downhill. The ending is the worst part of the book. After all that build-up and the various subplots, we don't even get any closure. There are also many loopholes and unexplained plot points. My biggest doubt was how Claudia, who is always super busy and a hyper-involved mom, suddenly finds ample free time to spend at Donovan’s house after Cat leaves, without even bothering about her own husband and baby daughter.

🌵 How can a book use cancer in the blurb and then have it just in passing during the story? We get to see Cat’s first-hand experience only when she hears from her doctor about the diagnosis. After that, nothing. No pondering over treatment options, no worry of death, no chemotherapy, no insecurity over what would happen to her kids, nothing!

🌵 Cat’s track should have generated much sympathy and emotional upheaval in me, but I ended up feeling nothing because of how distanced she was kept. And this is truly a missed chance because the author showed me in the initial chapters that he *can* write women characters well. But Donovan the jerk spoiled the whole show by hogging the attention.

🌵 There are some embarrassingly outdated and insensitive remarks about issues like race, gender, weight, sexual orientation and so on. I know that it's not the author but the character spouting/thinking those ideas, and I also remember that this is supposedly a satirical novel, but it's still cringe-worthy to read. Most of the adult main characters also seem not to know how to talk in front of kids.

All in all, this would have been my kind of book had it actually been a dark satire as promised in the blurb. But because it forgot the cancer sufferer and chose to focus more on her annoying husband, I didn't enjoy the reading experience. I still believe that the premise had potential, but something went wrong in the execution.

Can't recommend this one as a cancer story or as a satire. Might be read as a character-oriented literary fiction; it works somewhat better that way.

2 stars. (3 stars if read without the blurb/genre in mind. 1 star if read keeping an eye on the blurb. Averaging the two.)

My thanks to Dundurn Press and NetGalley for the DRC of “Lump”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.