Abundance (2021) by Jacob Guanzon

Book Review

Abundance (2021)

by Jacob Guanzon

    Abundance was a 2021 National Book Award longlist in fiction. I found it hard to take and impossible to enjoy, like a novel length exploration of the chaotic life of one of my clients from state court.  As a criminal defense attorneys, protagonists like the one in Abundance- Henry, the son of a single-dad immigrant at the lower levels of the American socio-economic ladder, describes a life that can only be described as a disaster:  Not great at school, drifts into juvenile delinquency via recreational drug use, impregnates the first girl he sleeps with, keeps the child, marries the girl, goes to prison, chases the girl out of his life after getting out of prison.  I've been a criminal defense attorney for 20 years and I've probably represented close to 2000, 2500 different human beings, and Henry's life experience tracks that of about half of those clients.  Another 30 percent are just older versions of this guy.

   And while I'm generally sympathetic to people and their problems, there is no question that I divide the world into two types of people.  The first category is people who only need to spend a single night in jail to figure out what they need to do to avoid that ever happening again, and the second category is people who don't get that message.  Henry is in that second category and I find him and his compatriots to be pretty exasperating.