In Daniel Roberts’s PONDER, best friends Murray (“Cheese”) Marks and John Apple embark upon their latest debauchery, a “ponder”—their code word for “wander.” The uber-wealthy John, who arranges and sponsors their ponders, hopes that this one will provide him with closure around a devastating childhood incident. It is late 1999, they are each 29, and the destination is where John’s awful episode occurred: Disney World. Clearly, this ponder will be different. Cheese tells us, “Maybe Disney had inspired me to have a real-life adventure? An actual wild ride where I spare my best friend a broken heart only to secure my own whole heart.”
The novel moves smoothly through a complex series of scenes and ends with an extended semi-hallucinatory, high-stakes race against time that resolves with the flourish of the book’s final sentence. Roberts has created rich parallels in both time and place. Disney World’s excesses—the endless rides, the junk food, the unrelenting cheerfulness of its brand, its weird secrets and legends (some true, others not)—pair up tidily with the excesses of the lavishly priced dinners, hotel suites, and bar tabs. In both narrative and setting, there is too much of everything.
The time evokes a dark, fast-approaching coming-of-age for both the characters and America. Blackberry phones and a booming economy reference the era. But more foreboding touchstones—Y2K, conspiracy theories—suggest that the gaiety is turning hysterical as the new millennium dawns: “We’d decided that the ubiquitous Nokia cellphone was less elegant than the BlackBerry’s huge silent screen. ‘Those typing machines are the devil,’ said Jack. ‘They will take over your ghost.’ ‘They’re the future,’ said John. ‘Then [the] future will be empty. There will be no ghosts in the future.’”
Waggish wit and banter abound. And yet, somewhere before the halfway point, one might find the indulgence, excess, and narcissism beginning to sour. Early on, one character says to another “Hell is someone else’s inside jokes”—and increasingly this feels prophetic.
Cheese and John fall in love with a woman they meet at Disney World. She is a wealthy, spoiled Southern belle without an iota of awareness about how the other classes live. But Cheese, the self-absorbed protagonist, is even more clueless about anything in the world beyond his own hedonism, including his marriage, which dissolves via texts over the course of the novel. He doesn’t grow from the book’s beginning to its end. One reference is made to a bad childhood experience at a fat camp, and his self-consciousness about his weight is a running motif. But this hardly explains his overall oafishness, especially toward and about “lower” class employees, women, and “exotic” people of color. (“What is it with Indians?” he wonders at one point.) One ill-advised scene involves an altercation with a little person that some readers will find humorous but others will find offensive. One senses that Cheese has constructed a deep-seated defense system, but why? We never learn. He is difficult to like, and without at least a hint as to why, his caustic asides grow irksome.
Still, Roberts’s writing is proficient, and readers who can overlook the protagonist’s arrogance and boorish behavior will enjoy PONDER’s story, fanciful setting, and oddball cast.
PONDER by Daniel Roberts is a witty, deftly written comic adventure that draws rich parallels between the excesses of an American icon in a bloated era and those of hedonistic friends on the cusp of manhood.
~Anne Welsbacher for IndieReader
