Thy Neighbor, by Norah Vincent

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I'm surprised more reviews of this book don't start with "I didn't finish this book." I know I almost didn't. It isn't that it isn't good, it's that the beginning is SO hard to get into. At least it was for me, mostly because of the main character/narrator, Nick.

Nick Walsh is possibly the least heroic character in recent literary memory. His back story reads like the origin story of a superhero. His parents died in a gory murder-suicide, leaving him behind to live in their family home and wallow in his grief. Except that a superhero would have wrapped up his wallowing at some point and become a vigilante do-gooder, bent on justice. Nick spends a decade as an aimless boozehound whose self-obsessed ramblings read like the early drafts of a graduate thesis about himself.

He eventually turns to his own kind of vigilantism in the form of wire-tapping his neighbour's houses and listening to their conversations. Not surprisingly he discovers some scandalous things about his neighbours but he's not exactly Batman. He's still just a dickhead determined to make his life as meaningless as possible.

Source: gearfuse.comI'm still not sure how to feel about this book. Sure the plot wraps up in ways that are skillful and, from a literary standpoint, I want to say that the "ends justify the means." But do they? The character of Nick Walsh does discover secrets about his parents' deaths by listening to his neighbors, but I'm not sure that's enough for me to get over how unlikable he is at the start of the novel. 

Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book from the publisher through GoodReads and NetGalley in exchange for an honest (though not necessarily favourable) review. The opinions expressed are strictly my own.