On the positive side, I did think this novel was easy to read. On the less positive side, I wish I hadn't bothered to read this one. Dan, the narrator, works in technology and is fired at the book's opening (he's been off his game ever since his son passed away). This is a good premise, especially as Dan struggles with balancing his continuing grief and the work required by his new startup tech company. The problem, for me, through was Dan himself. He was hopelessly naïve, believing technology could help solve society's most pressing problems without any repercussions. He often comments about the importance of his team, but really it's all about Dan. He's also the kind of man who thinks the ERA should be passed but also thinks it's perfectly okay to supervise his ex-girlfriend at work. I kept waiting for something to happen to deepen or add nuance Dan's view of the world, but it didn't and I felt like Dan was pretty much the same on the last page of this book as he was on the first (albeit richer by a few billion dollars). ( )

I kinda got lost pretty early on with this one and never really managed to get un-lost. I just couldn't connect with any of the characters ( )

Dan is the focus of self destruction. His life hits unexpected roads and turns, that lead to eventual success, but the paths that he chose at times were difficult. The entire book is full of twists and turns that take the characters in different directions physically and emotionally.

You can tell that Rich Marcello knows his way around words, as it was written beautifully. His words flow like poetry, but read like a novel. The book is written like a dream, with events and situations morphing into one another. In some parts of the book, it’s written purely for portrayal.

I feel you can sense the emotional turmoil from the characters, as well as the author himself. He seems to have a connection with the dark side in his mind, which helped set the tone for the readers. I found it to be very emotional in both dark with some hopeful scenarios threaded thought.

While still having the theme of being very dream like, I think it flowed very well. The reader shouldn’t interpret this as confusing, but as interpretive. This is not the type of book you read once. I would think this will be a book, read again and again, finding something new and different to think about with each new experience reading the book. Just the authors writing style could take one read through just to get the hang of. Overall, I would give this a 4/5, although it was amazingly written, this is a more difficult book to get through, since it’s more than just absorbing the plot. ( )

Rich Marcello’s The Beauty of the Fall is a novel of loss, despair, redemption, with a round of loss and despair and redemption again. Dan Underlight is a tech genius whose company RadioRadio is a huge success, but he’s the idea man, not the CEO, and when grief dries up his effectiveness, he is fired from the company he founded. He has good reason to grieve. He’s lost quite a bit, his marriage and his son, for whose death he feels guilt and responsibility.

He has an idea, though, for a new company, and if he can figure it out, he will be back better than ever–and he won’t just be making a big success; he will be literally saving the world. He envisions a social media platform that fosters conversations, consensus, and change unlike the modern megaphones of obstinacy and misanthropy.

I feel like a heel for being so disappointed in this book. After all, Underlight’s new technology passes the ERA, proposes solutions to reduce domestic violence, and to move us past inertia on climate change. He creates a company code that makes me go “awwwww.” He likes poetry, does games with his therapist and is just such a cool guy. But I don’t really like him much and I don’t really care much about him.

There are several reasons, but the primary one is that every other character in the book has no role, no agency, no substance other than as foils for Underlight. There’s a cardboard villain Olivia who gets a brief shining moment right at the end. The rest of the women, and there are several woman are variations on the manic pixie dream girl, especially Nessa, his therapist and Willow, his love. Tessa and Willow, you know they’re pixie dream girls before they open their mouths. And there’s a Zooey, too.

They are all slightly quirky, absolutely perfect and come along to do and say the right things to move Underlight along his path to enlightenment. They don’t really matter as people, only as catalysts. The men, other than his son, are the money men, an investor, the financial manager, because men = money, of course. Worse, it turns out his son was a catalyst, too. He even has his son, as an technologically aged avatar, assure him that he would not have wanted to live because his death brought good old dad to where he is today.

Oh my gawwwwwd, Everything Happens for a Reason! I hate that phrase and the ugly selfish sentiment behind it. Take it apart for a moment, take it to its conclusion. That child did not live his life to be himself, to have agency, to be a distinct self. Nope, his purpose was to die and teach his dad some valuable lesson. Willow’s hopes and dreams are immaterial, she exists to climb that damn tree. Everyone’s life is just grist for the grand narcissist whose maturation, emotional development, psycho-social integration, and financial success is their crowning achievement. It is such a selfish, egoistic sentiment and my skin crawls every time I hear it and I was dismayed to see it as one the central “lessons” of the book. I would be happy if I never heard this idea again.

Also, in some ways, Underlight is a closet creep. For all his feminism, he does some very unreconstructed hero of the patriarchy stuff. It keeps coming out in rare moments, inappropriate behaviors that damage his relationships and his life. Behaviors that reveal a sense of entitlement, of self-centeredness.

The book is full of lessons. Underlight has ideas for a better way to organize a corporation, a Code to govern their decisions that is excellent and would be lovely. He also wants to tackle some of the intractable problems, violence against women, climate change, and so much more, and thinks we can change the world with better technology.

As someone who was president of a state grassroots community organization with thousands of members, I thought his idea that we could solve the world’s problems if we only had a better platform a bit glib about the difficulty of the work. He is absolutely right, we are falsely polarized by politicians who present issues as false choices, by media who obfuscates more than it clarifies and a culture where people think they can have their own facts. Here’s the thing, a computer program substantiating facts ignores that people do not accept authority if it conflicts with the conclusions they want. People can hold some intellectual indefensible opinions if their income depends on it and they do it with bravado. He ignores that legislatures are often gerrymandered to the point of total impunity, with no one to hold them accountable other than extremists and lobbyists. There are issues we have nearly universal agreement on – such as background checks which 96% of Americans support – and which die in Congress again and again. It’s not the agreements that we lack, it’s the accountability.

I love Marcello’s ambitions, his desire for a better world, his ideas of another way to run a corporation, but to borrow from Augustus in Lonesome Dove, The Beauty of the Fall is “too leaky a vessel to hold so much hope.”

I think many people will like this book. People who liked Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder or Ishmael by Daniel Quinn will adore The Beauty of the Fall. I loathed those books, but most of the world loved them. So, I am contrary, I guess. They are all three ambitious in the effect they want in the world while lacking the kind of rigor that effect requires. The other two, though, sparked discussion in thousands of book forums and book clubs. I think this book could as well because it is, I think a love it or hate it book.

I received a review copy of The Beauty of the Fall from the author through a giveaway drawing at Goodreads.

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2017/01/15/the-beauty-of-the-fall-by... ( )

I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest reivew.

Dan Underlight finds himself suddenly jobless, pushed out of the hi-tech company he helped found. He fears this fall might break him; after all, he has endured so much - a divorce and the death of his 10 year old son.

I found this book to be a fascinating read; not only what was going on in Dan's life but about life lessons in general and thoughts about big, hi-tech companies. The symbolism of the pyramid is one of my favorite things about this book. I loved it because Dan learned many life-changing lessons and yet the book wasn't high-brow and unreachable to readers who have little knowledge of how hi-tech startup companies work.

Thumbs up for a great read! ( )