Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

I purchased this book 2 years ago because the blurb on the back was so weird. IT described the main character as having a father who's a mountain and a mother who's a washing machine. I was so intrigued that I bought it, and after reading it, it lives up to the promise of its blurb.

The main character,most commonly known as Alan, does indeed have a mountain in northern Canada for a father and a washing machine for a mother. He also has an equally odd assortment of brothers: a fortuneteller, an island, a dead man, and a set of three nesting dolls. However, Alan left when he was 18 and went south to Toronto. As the book opens, he's about 40 and has run a series of businesses that people remember fondly. At the start of the novel he's bought a house and plans to settle down to write a story. However, complications arise, as they always do.

There are essentially two stories interwoven in "Someone Comes to Town." The first deals with Alan's younger brother Davey, who Alan and his other brothers murdered in revenge for a terrible crime Davey committed. However, Davey didn't stay dead, and he's come back to get his vengeance on his brothers, most especially Alan. Alan also has to deal with the strangeness of himself, and try to discover just what is he. The discovery that his next door neighbor Mimi, a twentysomething young woman, has wings sheds some clues.

The other story thread, which Doctorow seems much more interested in, deals with a partnership between Alan and a thirty-year-old punk named Kurt to set up a free wireless network all across Toronto. They do this by building access points out of junked computer parts scavenged by street kids, which they then distribute to businesses to put on their roofs. Although the conflict between Alan and Davey is interesting, and exactly what Alan and his kin are is a fascinating mystery, Doctorow makes Alan and Kurt's quest to set up their wireless network the more exciting part of the book, and therefore the stuff about Davey and Alan's past seems like a distraction.

This is the one main flaw of the book: we are given Alan's unique and interesting background and the story of his early life, but not a lot was done with it. I frankly wanted to see more weird people who are not quite human, but aside from Mimi all we have are Alan and members of his family. I was OK with what they are being ambiguous and something of an unsolved mystery, I just wanted more to be done with it.

However, everything else was well done. Doctorow conjures up a very unique fantasy tale with Alan's background, and I loved reading it. Although I'm not a techie and a lot of the details went over my head, I loved the wireless story. Doctorow even acknowledges that it's all rather technical, as several times characters remark that they don't fully understand the plan. But the passion of the story demonstrates that this is something that Doctorow really cares about. I wasn't expecting to get excited about a story about creating a wireless network, but oh boy was that what happened.

The book is extremely well-written. The characters leap off the page and all of them seem fully formed and complicated, even Davey, who's basically pure evil. The plot is fast paced and I found myself zooming along quite easily. Doctorow also manages to pull off something quite tricky: Alan and each of his brothers, because of their odd upbringing, do not have a single name, but are instead known by a flurry of names all starting with the same letter. Alan, for example, is also referred to as Albert, Ari, Abraham, and the like. It could have been confuising but it ends up being pretty cool.

Aside from a lack of development of some of the weirder parts of the story and an attempt at a twist ending that suffers from being delivered too close to the end, "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town" is a really cool book, and I'd recommend it to anyone looking for something unique