Full disclosure: The author of the book that I am about to review is a patron at a library that I work at. All of the opinions stated in this review are solely mine.
I’ve read plenty of memoirs in the past from both celebrities and ordinary people. A lot of these people tend to write about their life when they’re of old age. This makes sense as one gets older, they usually spend time looking back on their life. Only a chunk of them have the urge to write it down and share it with others. Some might even write multiple memoirs like author Robert C. Jones. His book A Palindrome: A Universal Theme of Life, Growth, Maturity, and Agedness is the subject of our review.. It’s a nice autobiography, but I found it to be less interesting and more confusing than A Life Well Bred, A Life Well Led.
A Palindrome: A Universal Theme of Life, Growth, Maturity, and Agedness sums up what the reader needs to know about this book. It’s a memoir, in which Jones looks back on this life through the 4 themes mentioned in the title. He also ties the blandness of his name Bob to how he made an impact on the people around him.
Here’s what I like about the memoir. Majority of it covers his childhood, which is only a sliver of A Life Well Bred, A Life Well Led. I enjoyed reading the stories involving Jones’s time up north. I really got a sense of the environment and the loving and eccentric people around him. I also liked the tales he tells about his friendship with the elderly Lebanese neighbor Grace. She seems like she would be a wonderful person to talk to. I felt for him when he discussed his feelings when she passed away. In addition, I like how Jones gives even more details about stories he first covered in A Life Well Bred, A Life Well Led. For example, he first mentions the story about being hit by a car while on his way for his first day of school in A Life Well Bred, A Life Well Led, yet it’s only briefly mentioned. In A Palindrome, he elaborates on that experience a little more. It was nice to hear more about what happened.
Outside of childhood, I liked Jones’s ode to social distancing. That phrase usually has negative connotations (especially within the last 5 years), but he puts a nice spin on it in his poem “On Social Distancing.” He’s more than happy to do that when he’s dealing with people he doesn’t like. He’s perfectly fine with being alone.
However, I didn’t find it as interesting as A Life Well Bred, A Life Well Led. This is mainly so because it was less cohesive. There was a framing device of the averageness of the name Bob and every Bob is unique, yet outside of the introduction and a few lines dispersed throughout the book, it’s not very consistent. While I was reading it, there were times that I forgot about the whole Bob name thing. Say what you want about A Life Well Bred, A Life Well Led, at least it had an interesting framing device that was clear and present. I only wish the one for A Palindrome was just as precise. In addition, A Palindrome had some of the same poems that I first read in A Life Well Bred, A Life Well Led. I wouldn’t be surprised if Jones included those again because he didn’t have enough pages.
Finally, I was confused at one section of the book. At one point, Jones discusses the funeral he went to as a child. Then suddenly, he goes into another funeral with four old men that are supposed to be Jones’s childhood friends, and they watch a video of the dead guy talking to them. I had a lot of questions during that section. Is the dead guy supposed to be Jones himself? Is this supposed to be how he wants his funeral to be? Was this a deleted scene from one of the Richville books? I wish that there was a better transition and a clearer reason to why he had it in there.
A Palindrome: A Universal Theme of Life, Growth, Maturity, and Agedness by Robert C. Jones is a fine memoir. It’s got some nice stories of him growing up and fun poems. However, it’s not as interesting nor cohesive as his previous one, for its framing device is not as developed as it should be. It doesn’t help that it has sections, in which I was baffled as to why they were there in the first place. Like I said in the A Life Well Bred, A Life Well Led, I would only recommend it to those who love reading materials from local authors.
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Book Reviews by a Chick Who Reads Everything 