-by douglas adams
2002 (ultimate edition)
You know how once in a long while, some things of fantastic repute are just as good as advertised?
I feel like a traitorous cad to say this, but douglas adams isn't one of them.
People whose opinions i respect often love adams. Monty pythons, or neil gaiman (who wrote the foreword for this collection), and many others offer devoted testimony. I want to love him, i do. If you're stuck in a cabin in the woods with barely tolerable relatives, and an adams novel is the only book sitting in a basket of Redbook magazines, it sure as hell beats mushroom-hunting with uncle lou...but not by a lot. The best thing about this collection is the aforementioned foreword, actually. Rich, beguiling prose, but gaiman's talk about the transformational power of adams' work mystifies me. And maybe that's okay. Maybe it doesn't mean the devotees are defective, or I'M defective...i should have loved adams, though! It seemed like i was so temperamentally well-suited as a teenager. I was an avid reader, intelligent and already inclined toward sci fi and british humor. The unseen emanations of cultural inclinations pointed me to adams, so i read the first novel, and...nothing special. Maybe i was in a strange mood that week? I meant to read another, but never got around to it. Thirty years later, this collection fell into my lap, and i decided to rectify my probably-faulty initial impression. I read all five novels, and...nothing. Good, but an "heir to twain"? Great googily, not even close. Adams was intelligent and offbeat and imaginative, but with all the buildup that gaiman and others provide, the reality just feels like somebody's slipped you a watered-down substitute, hoping you'll be cowed enough to not mention the naked head of state. And the thought that's most pernicious, is wondering whether adams himself would have been the first to say that his books really are adams-lite.
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