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Title: Vernon Downs

Author: Jaime Clarke

Narrator: David Ledoux

Format: Unabridged

Length: 6 hrs and 35 mins

Language: English

Release date: 10-14-14

Publisher: Audible Studios for Bloomsbury

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

Charlie Martens is desperate for stability in an otherwise peripatetic life. An explosion that killed his parents when he was young robbed him of normalcy and he was shuttled from relative to relative, left alone to decipher the world he encountered in order to cobble together an answer as to how he would live. Ever the outcast, Charlie recognizes in Olivia, an international student from London, the sense of otherness he feels and their relationship seems to promise salvation. But when Olivia abandons him, his desperate mind fixates on her favorite writer, Vernon Downs, who becomes an emblem for reunion with Olivia. Charlie's quest takes him from Phoenix to New York City and when chance brings him into proximity to Vernon Downs, he quickly ingratiates himself into Downs' world. Proximity invites certain temptations, though, and it isn't long before Charlie moves dangerously from fandom to apprentice to outright possession.

Members Reviews:

Read something else -- don't bother with this one.

Charlie is a loser and Vernon a jerk. I wouldn't recommend this book.

Inside the Mind of a Literary Fiction Stalker (i.e., Not Creepy)

While I enjoyed Vernon Downs, I did not find it as "gripping, hypnotically written and unnerving" as Tom Perrotta did (according to the cover blurb). Perhaps that is because, unlike Perrotta, I am not a well-known author. I can understand why an author might be unnerved by Jaime Clarke's tale of an overzealous student who stalks, befriends, and ultimately masquerades as his former girlfriend's favorite writer, purportedly in order to woo her back. I say "purportedly" because, although Charlie says that his efforts to connect with Vernon Downs are intended to lure Olivia back to him, his actions in fact seem to be driven by his own desire for success and fame, no matter how vicarious. However, I never really connected with either Charlie or Vernon, so at the end it all just seemed much ado about nothing.

The best part of the novel for me was Charlie's unintended public reading of a particularly violent passage from Vernon's most recent (and controversial) book, to an audience at a summer writing conference to which he has not actually been invited. His reading causes an outraged feminist protest and, ultimately, a book burning by women equating Vernon's book with "carv[ing] his initials into [them] like the trunks of trees." This episode was both amusing and frightening, given the ongoing debate about "trigger warnings" on college campuses. I practically stood up and applauded the lone female dissent:

"The material of Vernon David Downs is strong, unpleasant, and to my mind, not very important, which is why I chose not to attend. But should what is presented here be shaped to the most vulnerable among us? With all respect for the sensitivities of those who find the material offensive, as a woman I find it ironic that we seem on the verge of returning to the time when someone else decided, 'The material is a big rough.