Winston Groom's Forrest Gump is a journey of hardship and accomplishment, a critique of social prejudices against minority, a romance of the true love that avoids all cliche drama. In the first half, that is. And the last few paragraphs. The rest is Mummy and Star Wars and Tarzan and pretty much everything mixed up in a catastrophe that, fortunately for Groom, will at least be appreciated by some people. Like Jackson Pollock. And yes, I'm not a fan of action painting or ridiculous ramblings. (My apologies to Mr. Pollock, I am not being derogatory about action painting itself.)
The heart of what I'm saying is this. I don't see why Forrest had to become a ping pong champion and save Mao Zedong and travel to mars and fight with the Pygmies and become a millionaire just to see Jenny Curran already married. (And I actually am complaining about the unfinished love story, although I have some respect for this "true love.") The story was so irrelevant and wandering that I had a weak laughter going for seventy pages.
And chrissake, Dan. Dan was supposed to be this philosopher guy, a history teacher, until Groom turns his character up-side-down and makes a derelict and a demagogue and a con-man out of him. I don't complain if Dan's story is depicted thoroughly and tragically, but the brevity with which Groom deals with Dan -- now that's true tragedy.
Even an idiot could tell that the book would have been much better off without the exciting and childish adventures.
