Publishers Weekly
03/30/2015
Steeves’s debut novel chronicles the anxieties of a married couple. Readers are given direct access to the couple’s thoughts about each other, their marriage, and their belief that nothing has worked out the way they expected, in stream-of-consciousness narration that is sometimes uncomfortably honest. James is preoccupied with his lack of success and his lack of motivation to complete his frequently referenced but never defined “life’s work,” while Mary is predominantly concerned about how unconcerned James is with their difficulties conceiving. These worries are amplified when both have to confront an out-of-the-ordinary event one night. The monotony and discomfort of innermost thoughts, through normal and abnormal circumstances, are brought to life in this novel, pulling the reader into the exhausting cycle of anxiety in which the narrators have lived for years. Coupled with a dense writing style that has no line or paragraph breaks, the effect is one of ceaseless chatter that may tax readers’ patience and focus. Those interested in the psychology of the characters and the dynamics of their marriage will find the novel engaging; others may find the lack of resolution disappointing. (May)
From the Publisher
Priase for Giving Up:
"Mike Steeves is a brilliant, singular voice in Can Lit: funny and fresh and fast! Giving Up burns and glows with the intensity of a blue flame and all the pathos and obsessiveness and truth and absurdity of modern coupledom." —Miriam Towes, author of All My Puny Sorrows
"Few first novels in recent memory are as consistently charming, smart, entertaining and incisive as Giving Up. Somehow Mike Steeves has written a page-turner about stray cats and trips to the bank, and a story that treads through the banalities of everyday life with such precision to cast each detail, every gesture and object and silence, with great meaning. —Pasha Malla
"Mike Steeves' Giving Up is in places like a Facebook-era version of Paula Fox's 1970s New York classic Desperate Characters: a lucid micro-portrait of an apartment-bound couple facing childlessness, marital landlock and a malevolent feline presence. But its pulse is faster, warmer, more irregular—a chamber piece for two voices sharing disappointingly overhyped takeout. It is a woozily funny yet deeply decent view of adult love that finds the whole rigamarole preposterous but, in that, somehow the more worthwhile. It broke the shit out of my heart. Read it with someone you adore who you fear half the time can't stand the sight of you." —Carl Wilson, author of Let's Talk About Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste
"This is a novel of unrelenting relatability, truth, contravention, hope, loss, and usefulness. Within these 208 pages, the reader may be forced to accept the dark side of her/himself, and the society from which s/he was contrived. I can see myself returning to this book once a year, every year, for the rest of my life." —James Bonner for Nomadic Press
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