Mr Breakfast: A Novel

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This is classic Carroll with beautiful characters, a plot that keeps you on your toes and and ending that you never want to come. It’s true that this life gives him the company and comfort he longs for, but he can’t settle for it while still yearning for one spent making audiences laugh. The opening was promising, setting up the type of tilt-a-whirl, unbalancing ride I’ve come to expect from Carroll that is so often satisfyingly unexpected. In all of them there is love or fame and of course danger because once he has chosen, there is no telling what will happen next. But when Patterson visits his now middle-aged high school sweetheart, he is left harrowed and heartbroken.

That random, apparently inconsequential choices braid together to make up the fabric of our lives, and we will never be able to unpick any of it.

Short black haircut, jeans faded and ripped at the knees, and a sleeveless fuchsia t-shirt that said “HEARTY FUSE” in large white letters across the chest. Breakfast” — depict the abrupt irruption of the uncanny and terrifying into our familiar workaday world.

It will surprise you, make you laugh and scare you — and then, just when you think it’s over, add several extra twists before bringing this Rubik’s Cube of a story to just the right, emotionally muted conclusion. Patterson had reached that point in Providence, the quiet murmur of the audience in reaction to his best comedy routine the final devastation. My relationship with Carroll — if you’ll allow me a bit of an indulgence here — is, once again, complicated. Even though her mother is a general in Navarre’s army, 20-year-old Violet Sorrengail was raised by her father to follow his path as a scribe.

Breakfast is the latest from Jonathan Carroll, in which the author asks a familiar question: What would you do if you had it to do all over again? The book is about a failed comedian named Graham Patterson who is given a magical tattoo that enables him, in middle age, to see three different variations of how his life would have turned out had he made different choices. I thought the ending was a little lacking, and there were some details I wish he'd have spent more time on, and other parts of the book, I wish he'd have spent less.

That sense of needing more is always a key litmus test of any novel for me, and Mr Breakfast passed easily. I can appreciate it as a work of art, famous image and all, but I also remember what was going on in Graham’s life then, and how much confusion he was in at the time he took it. Mr Breakfast is a book that would appeal to a more mainstream audience than the genre fair I usually read.After this misfire, Graham is unsure about trying out his third life, or love life, so he just rolls along in his current life. He had a few thousand dollars left in his bank account afterward, which would get him across the country to where his patient and very successful brother Joel was waiting with a job, if he wanted it. Carroll is an experienced author who can take fantastical ideas and give them a sense of place and purpose. The novel thrilled me; it made me reflect on art, love, choices, and regrets; it left me with tears in the corners of my eyes and a smile on my face. Never in his life had Graham Patterson wanted or even considered getting a tattoo, although he liked some he saw on other people.