Lord Fear

May 25, 2015
In the hands of New York author and writing teacher Mann (Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere), a chronicle of his older brother's life before it ended in a heroin overdose becomes a suspenseful, if stilted, character study. Mann both adored and feared his older half-brother, Josh, who died at age 28 when the author was 13. Josh was handsome and brilliant, a bodybuilder, a charming ladies' man, and a sadist to those he lovedâhis mother, his brothers, his girlfriends. By interviewing the people Josh loved and was closest to, author Mann builds the story of his brother's life through narrative reconstructionâa creative nonfictionâfor a fluid account that never allows the reader to be moved. The younger brother is hungry to learn about Josh's transgressions as a way to both remember his brother and gain a kind of self-knowledge. On the one hand, his brother provided a model of manhood as a sexual being, a free spirit, and an artist; yet on the other hand, Josh was fragile and spoiled, gripped by inexplicable anxiety ("lord fear"), given to humiliate people, fond of a terrifying pet boa constrictor, and submerged in debilitating drug use in his 20s. Mann's references to the writing of Nabokov, Philip Roth, Roland Barthes, and Virginia Woolf on memory and loss lend the work an elegiac tone, but all the feeling here is cold and hard.

Starred review from March 1, 2015
An ambitious, literary-minded memoir of the author's relationship with his late brother, a much older heroin addict.Mann (Writing/Univ. of Massachusetts, Dartmouth; Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere, 2013) works on a number of different levels, delivering a narrative of addiction, memory, and family dynamics; of the attempt to see someone through the eyes and different memories of other people; and of the challenges faced by a writer as he attempts to fulfill his literary ambitions. Ultimately, this is a memoir about trying to write a memoir: the challenge, the impossibility, and the catharsis. It begins at the funeral of Mann's older brother, Josh, since the author, 13 at the time, "once read a Philip Roth novel that begins over a grave." Before he's done, he will invoke Nabokov, Burroughs, Woolf, and Kincaid as literary antecedents whose inspiration has informed his own work. Unlike, say, James Frey, Mann drops his cards on the table from the start, admitting in his author's note that though the focus of the book is a real person, "it is not, however, an exact representation of his life. People's memories contradict one another, and many of the scenes are my imagined versions of the stories they told me, complete with my own subjectivity." In the book, in death, and in the memories of the author and others, Josh is larger than life, a person who "could have been a rock star so easily. Some kind of star," as a friend recalls. He was a would-be musician, a would-be writer, the lover of all sorts of gorgeous, exotic women, a troubled child from before the author's birth, and a junkie who died alone, unexpected and inexplicably, after he'd shown his family and friends he'd cleaned up. In constructing his aching, poignant narrative, Mann offers a fine meditation on fate and on how "the story of addiction is the story of memory, and how we never get it right."

March 15, 2015
Mann spent nearly 10 years ferreting out this picture of his older half brother, Josh, dead of a drug overdose. Mann was much younger than his blustery, angry brother. The actions that seemed incomprehensible and abnormal to the adults in their lives are seen by the younger Mann as sometimes admirable or brave or normal but scary. Thus, amid the terror found in this book are also moments of joy. Helping Mann uncover the story of his brother's short life are his parents, his friends, his other half brother, and strangers (though friends to Josh). They feed him images he mulls overhis brother making music or being tender or gaining weight. The writing here is hesitant and questioning as Mann aims to be true to both his young self and his current self. Even so, the puzzle of the brother remains in pieces. What can this story be but fragments? Lies? The pages here are spiked with brother Josh's work: journal entries, poems, odes to determination that went nowhere. Lord Fear treads carefully, but the shards on this path are ever painful.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)