Incomplete Book Review: The Choice by Nicholas Sparks

The beginning of this preview greets us with the characters Matt and Travis, who seem to be caught in a premeditated malaise as they attempt to install a spa in the heat of the sun.  There is no indication that either is aware, or remotely concerned, about OSHA safety recommendations, and nothing in their description lends itself to interpreting proper back harnesses are in place.  As such, despite the hope that two more friends will arrive to ease the burden, we can already see that each of these fools is in for a chiropractic episode.  W find out that Matt is suspicious that Travis has lied to him about actually asking the friends to join.  When the third friend Joe finally arrives, the spa is already in place, and though the author lends nothing to the description of Matt’s reaction that could remotely be interpreted as seething anger, I’m going to guess as much here.

Joe’s horrible children are in tow (note, for accuracy’s sake, the children are nowhere described as horrible, but it is implied in that they are the spawn of Joe, who himself is a massive twit) in addition to Allison and Megan (who seem to have nothing to contribute to this preview).  Doubled over in pain, Matt can only spare an irate glare at Travis when he learns that Travis has betrayed him by telling Joe to come at 5pm, which is far beyond the regulated time allotment for spa installment.

There is a bit of a row concerning Matt’s aversion to his father-in-law’s stories about prostate cancer, and for this Nicholas Sparks can be forgiven for sparing us the details.  Somehow Matt’s wife Liz is involved in this mix of characters, though how and why is never addressed; she seems to simply show up and have vague conversations with the Alison woman.

We are finally left with the following observation by Matt that seems to act as the theme of this intro: “His life, he sometimes thought, resembled a beer commercial.”  In his deathly agony from moving the spa, Matt must simply sit back and observe, like a horribly aware comatose victim, as his friends and their awful kids run around in the backyard.  We can only guess at the dark thoughts that linger in the wake of the great spa betrayal.

Overall, this preview conveys an intentionally-dulled version of mediocrity.  Like a pair of socks that have faded in color but don’t yet have holes in them, this story does the job and no more.  Sparks never cuts deeper into Matt’s emotions and never questions the meaning of his tedious existence.  You get the feeling that the spa is a broken metaphor for something even Sparks does not fully grasp, as if he is electing to have the reader stand in as his interpreter, and hopefully give him direction on a way forward in a world that is at times so banal that you can only ever see the obvious and direct meaning in things.

How it would end if I had written it

As the days pass, Matt is thrown deeper and deeper into pain as the spa moving has caused him great nerve damage.  At a dinner party one night, after being propped up by Liz and loaded with hydrocodone, Matt impresses his guests with a vegetable cutting performance.  Travis is especially wowed, and a little suspicious that Matt is able to be so nimble in spite of his supposed pain.  Little does Travis know that Matt has been taking internet courses in knife sharpening.

Eventually, Matt’s birthday rolls around and Travis gets the awful idea of renting out an adult-sized bounce house.  Even though Liz had tries to talk him out of the idea, Travis insists that Matt’s pain is fake and that the allure of a bounce house will coax him out of bed and back into full ambulation.  Meanwhile, Joe has decided to rent a keg for the party, unaware of Travis’ plans that conflict with this decision from a moral perspective.  The keg is ultimately very grand with a four-set of old bath legs propping up what could be a cask if it were not made of a sad kind plastic or vinyl.  Instead of inspiring more beer commercial moments, the keg acts as a grand unifier to the anemic white people who show up to Matt’s birthday.  Various theories surrounding the genesis of the unusual keg are thrown around, and eventually it is decided that a podcast must be started in the keg’s honor, as the group of Travis, Alison, Megan, and Joe search for answers.

One day, an email from a guy in Muscatine, Illinois confirms that he had once seen a very similar keg on the deck of an old pirate ship that had been repurposed to be a party boat.  Alison is skeptical at first, but then she hunts down an archived photo of a newspaper clipping that mentions a man named Jeff “Blackbeard” Burns, who appears to be wearing a necklace that appears to be composed of rave-style glow-sticks.  After multiple interviews with locals, who can neither confirm nor deny the existence of the pirate ship, Alison and Megan decide to train with a deep sea diver, and finally take the plunge to the bottom of the Mississippi River, where they find an anchor that seems too gnarly to belong to anything.

Many weeks pass with more and more seemingly meaningless and tangential discoveries.  It seems like they are on the cusp of finding the truth; if only they could find “Blackbeard” Burns, all of their questions might be answered.

But they eventually discover that the search itself is the answer that they are actually looking for, and that life is an endless procession of looking, a yearning that will never be quite right if the actual truth is ever found, because in the darkness everything is infinite and nothing is settled.