There are Reasons Noah Packed No Clothes

Robert Jacoby

Richard has just tried to commit suicide. It’s not the first time, and who knows if it will be the last. He will be committed to a mental hospital, and he signs himself in before he knows what he’s doing. Richard is only 19.

The writing at the beginning of this novel got me worried .The stream of consciousness style doesn’t normally do it for me, as I find it really disconcerting. In this instance though, it worked the majority of the time. This was not a comfortable book to read. So if you were looking for comfort, don’t read it.

I think out of all the characters, I liked the schizophrenic the best. The depiction of depression here was quite accurate though (from my personal experience only), although I would have liked to know more clearly about the cause behind it.

The cover sort of appealed to me, and sort of didn’t. It fit in with Richard’s life, in that the colours of his life weren’t really clear, and tied in with the way he often saw strange things. The language, the strange metaphors I think they were pretty amazing and unbelievable.

I didn’t feel that the ending was satisfying. I didn’t understand about the shirt, or whether Richard was feeling better, or whether he was still hallucinating. For much of the novel it felt like nothing was happening, and then there wasn’t even much of a climax at the end.

What I would have liked was a preface telling me what time period this book was set in. The medication Richard was on seemed to make him hallucinate which is a rare side effect of depressive drugs. And isolation wards are not as common as they once were, or at least, they aren’t applied quite in that way. It’s a very jaded view of the mental health system.

Adults only on this one, unless you want to freak out a teenager. Frequent mentions of porn and sex. Three stars from me, simply because I wasn’t satisfied with the ending. A good example of this style of writing though.