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A review by clairebau
Bream Gives Me Hiccups by Jesse Eisenberg
funny
lighthearted
reflective
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Loveable characters? Yes
3.0
It should come as no surprise that Eisenberg writes well (and I do mean that. Not just passably, but well); a career spent poring over scripts to critically analyze word choice will give you a good eye for what works and what doesn't.
It's hard to say whether it was a wise decision to open with titular story Bream Gives Me Hiccups. I went in skeptically; attempts at adults-writing-from-a-child's-perspective-for-an-adult-audience are often made and rarely something I enjoy, but he nailed the earnest naivety of a nine-year-old making sense of the world and, more aptly, his family. Wannabe good writers will spoon-feed you exposition with off-putting vigor. Eisenberg hides it in Easter eggs you'll delight in plucking from the fertile grass of the lawn he delicately tends. This section was a delight. I would have loved a novel-length adaptation of these rich concepts and characters, but instead I was forced to immediately afterward trudge through his other - worse - stories.
As with any collection of unrelated stories, there will be hits (Bream Gives Me Hiccups, A Guy on Acid Tries to Pick up a Woman at a Bar) and misses (My Nephew has some Questions, A Post-Gender-Normative Man Tries to Pick Up a Woman at a Bar). This book feels a bit like an episode of SNL in that way and others, namely that most of the stories in the latter-half of the book feel like little more than extensions of a good idea for a bit. You read the title and you're like, okay, sure, got it, and you read the story to find it's exactly what you expected (A Bully Does his Research, particularly). That doesn't necessarily make them any less enjoyable, but it certainly fails to make them feel special, different, or interesting. It's clear that Eisenberg tries his very best to say something with this book, whether it be about new-age feminism or Marxism or society at large, but that messaging fell flat next to his frankly brilliant characterization of the mundane players in the more "vapid" stories (the titular and My Roommate Stole my Ramen), which he handled with obvious skill and care.
Tl;dr: I demand a fictional novel from Eisenberg!
It's hard to say whether it was a wise decision to open with titular story Bream Gives Me Hiccups. I went in skeptically; attempts at adults-writing-from-a-child's-perspective-for-an-adult-audience are often made and rarely something I enjoy, but he nailed the earnest naivety of a nine-year-old making sense of the world and, more aptly, his family. Wannabe good writers will spoon-feed you exposition with off-putting vigor. Eisenberg hides it in Easter eggs you'll delight in plucking from the fertile grass of the lawn he delicately tends. This section was a delight. I would have loved a novel-length adaptation of these rich concepts and characters, but instead I was forced to immediately afterward trudge through his other - worse - stories.
As with any collection of unrelated stories, there will be hits (Bream Gives Me Hiccups, A Guy on Acid Tries to Pick up a Woman at a Bar) and misses (My Nephew has some Questions, A Post-Gender-Normative Man Tries to Pick Up a Woman at a Bar). This book feels a bit like an episode of SNL in that way and others, namely that most of the stories in the latter-half of the book feel like little more than extensions of a good idea for a bit. You read the title and you're like, okay, sure, got it, and you read the story to find it's exactly what you expected (A Bully Does his Research, particularly). That doesn't necessarily make them any less enjoyable, but it certainly fails to make them feel special, different, or interesting. It's clear that Eisenberg tries his very best to say something with this book, whether it be about new-age feminism or Marxism or society at large, but that messaging fell flat next to his frankly brilliant characterization of the mundane players in the more "vapid" stories (the titular and My Roommate Stole my Ramen), which he handled with obvious skill and care.
Tl;dr: I demand a fictional novel from Eisenberg!