“The Cry of The Sloth” by Sam Savage

Dear Mrs. Lessup,
Thanks for letting us read once again “The Mistletoe’s Little Shoes”. After careful consideration we have concluded that this work still does not meet our needs. I am sorry that you were misled by the phrase, “does not meet our needs at this time” into thinking that you should submit it again. In the publishing world “at this time” means “forever”.
A.Whitaker, Editor at Soup

“The Cry of The Sloth” is an epistolary novel, i.e. it is made up of mostly letters. It takes place in the 1970’s when people still actually wrote letters. Today such a novel would be made up of emails, blog entries, Facebook messages, and tweets.

The letters in this novel are all written by Andy Whitaker who edits a literary magazine, but manages apartments for survival money. He lives by himself, but has an ex-wife Jolie.

The novel gets off to a good start with many short entries like the one above, mostly concerning his literary magazine. These entries are often hilarious.

There are various kinds of letters and entries in this novel which I will list in descending order of their interest to me.

• Literary Magazine letters – these were generally short and funny like the one above. Savage knows whereof he speaks.
• Apartment Manager letters – Usually about getting tenants to pay some rent, still usually short and funny
• Letters to ex-wife and other friends – These tended to be maudlin and went on for pages and pages with very little humor. I suppose Savage was trying for some pathos with these personal letters which he doesn’t achieve.
• Sections from the novel he is writing – Andy is trying to write a best seller to solve his economic woes. Of course for an editor of a literary magazine, a best seller is by definition bad writing. It probably would have been OK if these bad writing sections were a playful paragraph or two, but instead they go on and on an interminable and very tiresome 8 pages.

One of the problems here is that all of the letters are written by Andy Whitaker himself. In most of the good epistolary novels I’ve read, you have several people writing the letters. You get a variety of styles and voices and you get the interaction between several interesting people. Here you only have Andy Whitaker, and his voice, his thought process,  his attitude toward life are banal and wearisome.
Sam Savage’s previous novel was “Firmin – The Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife”, the story of a rat. The rat had pretty much the same interests and personality as Andy Whitaker. In a rat these were charming and funny; in a human they just get irritating. Although this novel is called “The Cry of the Sloth”, the sloth is not a character in this novel.
My interest in the various letters and other entries in this novel was inversely proportional to the length of the entries. I quite liked the real short entries, could barely keep reading the long entries. As the novel progresses(?), the entries keep getting longer and longer.
At 225 close-written pages, this novel is much too long for the ground covered. It is just too much of Andy Whitaker, this somewhat revolting character. If the entries had been kept sharper and shorter, perhaps there could have been a 90-page novella. On the other hand, an uninteresting story, an unlikable character; why bother? .