The title, sub-title really, and the summary-blurb, and even some of the quotes on the cover left me with higher expectations, that I was going to be treated to some insightful reading of Man through Nature. An updated Thoreau. Modern Romanticism. I regularly reread Thoreau and read Wordsworth for fun. So I was quite excited to receive this as a Christmas present and started into it immediately.
Axelrod retreats to the woods in order to think out and sort out his place in the world. A big goal. A combination of setbacks, or major changes, have left him somewhat adrift: graduation and the feeling of not knowing what's next, a romantic disappointment, and worst of all, a devastating injury to one of his eyes, suffered in the last few minutes of a pickup basketball game during his senior year of college. The confusion of major transitions can be difficult to overcome, heart break can heal quickly with some courage and confidence, but physical injury, especially to Essential Components can really crush the spirit.
So, his trip to the woods was designed to heal, physically and emotionally.
The first third of the book is super tight. Lots of walks in the woods, accompanied by lots of notes about the transitions of seasons, metaphors for Axelrod's transitions from student to professional, from Boy-Man to Man.
But after the first third, we got sort of jumpy and disorganized - like the editing pen stopped and the focus that we had was gone. Winters merge, we jump to a scene in Italy - an important one, but seemingly thrown in to explain why we went to the woods in the first place - was it romantic disappointment or physical injury that forced us out of the social order? The physical injury seems an afterthought until after the romantic disappointment. So we go to the woods, but eventually family pressures pull us back to the mainland of social interaction - where a seemingly innocent Thanksgiving dinner nearly turns disastrous.
Ultimately, I was disappointed.
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