Book Review :: The Funny Moon by Chris Lincoln

Guest Post by Dave Greeley

Clair loved Wally but lately didn’t like him very much.

Wally is reminiscent of Jim Harrison’s Johnny Lundgren and Bukowski’s Henry Chinaski, guys who understand the cost of doing things the way they do because they are nothing if not self-aware.

The Funny Moon is set in a small New England college town where Wally grew up and to which he retreated in his late twenties. Lincoln renders it with a clarity that borders on virtual reality, and it becomes one of the book’s leading characters. After a few chapters, readers will feel like they grew up there, too. Inevitably, the walls are closing in on Wally. His main client wants social media advertising, a subject Wally knows nothing about. His wife Claire is running out of patience with him, or maybe she is outgrowing him. Even some of his lifelong chums are looking askance at him.

This is a classic coming-of-middle-age story, but Lincoln sails past every cliché with scenes so well-played the ending is one readers could not have predicted. The Funny Moon is sun-dappled and bleak, both a “What a ride” and “What the fuck?” As Jim Harrison puts it in Warlock, “The trouble is that no one gets to be anyone else.”

The Funny Moon by Chris Lincoln. Rootstock Publishing, June 2023.

Dave Greeley worked with the author for several years in the early 1980s. He is a communications consultant to clients in education, pharma, and high technology.