"October", a novel

by Richard B. Wright

I'm not having the best of luck lately with books. Could be that I'm too picky, but there must be something else beside nice prose to make me feel that I didn't waste time reading the book. Well, "October" is a slow book about a father who lost his wife to cancer and whose daughter is diagnosed with cancer, too. He then meets a man, crippled by polio and in wheelchair, with whom, as a boy, he spent a summer vacation 60 years earlier. There are flashes back in time to that summer where both boys--one in the wheelchair, another on his feet--discovered sexual attraction of a girl their age. While both storylines had potential to develop into a captivating tale, they somehow waned toward the end. The crippled man asks his former childhood friend to accompany him to Zurich where he's going to be euthanized, for he too is dying from cancer. There they both reminisce about the summer when they knew each other, but the story of that summer ends with them departing on their own ways without having any consequences on present time. So, in the end, I feel cheated: after suffering through all the cancerous developments there was not even the basic satisfaction of finding the loose ends tied.