by Matthew Sharpe
2010, Bloomsbury
This is going to be a short entry, in part because I returned the book to the library and can't quote and in part because I read it a while ago (and as my computer has been broken for awhile, I've been relatively unable to blog).
You Were Wrong is a very funny, short love story about a high school math teacher who falls in love with his step-sister (unbeknownst to him, naturally). The main character is a buffoonish intellectual who has trouble process information at socially normal speeds. He lives in his dead mother's house with her last husband, an egocentric windbag whom our hero attempts, inexplicably, to kill.
Sharpe writes these incredibly precise little characters who are quite fun to read but then does little from the deus ex machina perspective with his creations. It's as though they are little wind-up toys that we spend three quarters of the book winding, only to watch them scramble about and get stuck on the carpet in its last act.
The plot is largely unimportant and is a little confusing, given how little of it there is.
Sharpe's prose is witty and, well, sharp. He often made me laugh out loud. The dialogue is verbose but its verbosity and the reader's subsequent entanglement in it are delightful in the same way it is to watch Donald O'Connor do a pratfall.
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