Checking Out
By: Nick Spalding / Narrated By: Simon Mattacks
Length: 8 hrs and 35 mins
Looooming death made hilarious, profane, somewhat touching. Therefore? Typical Spalding!
I love Nick Spalding, tho’ I sometimes have to prep my toes for their inevitable curling at gratuitous and gross and graphic sex and profanity. This prude here, who avoids like the PLAGUE, a Regency that takes a trip away from the drawing room and cavorts to the bedroom just happens to delight in Spalding’s depravity.
That said, however, I’ve seen the dude’s picture, and I dunno that I can say someone with chipmunk teeth can truly be seen as dePRAved, you know?
Speaking of chipmunks… if you listen to this little gem of an audiobook, you’ll be hearing Alvin and the Chipmunks in your brain next time you suffer the consequences of eating too many prunes, thereby finding yourself empathizing with our poor danged long-suffering hero, Nathan James as an allergic reaction interrupts a heavy-duty wooing session.
Our story opens with young Nathan James FINALLY being able to detach himself from his mega-hit creation, The Foodies (Humongous dancing fruit and veggies that sing songs to teach and delight children), and he’s taking the money and running. He LOVES his shallow life, and he can’t wait to bed his shallow (And HOT) girlfriend when he suffers from a harbinger of doom that lands him in the doctor’s office.
Tests show a tumor in his brain, inoperable due to its position, and the poor git has very little time on this earth; as a matter of fact? He could drop dead at any minute. This sends him into a spiral of gloom and doom, but he’s surrounded by a stellar cast of characters: From his loving cousin who’s bringing up an autistic son on her own, to his sculptress mother who litters her house and lawns with graphically depicted statues that enrage the neighbors, to! what else? a newfound love-interest.
This would happen to be Allie, aka Libby the Lemon. Who knew?
As Nathan tries to navigate the time he has left, seesawing wildly through emotions, trying to bed Allie via soulful singing and guitar playing (That reaction leading to amplified and broadcast and heavily-sped up bowel explosion sounds!), he keeps finding himself doing something he haaaaates: Looking at himself and his life. And I mean, reeeeeally looking at it.
The book is fraught with self-reflection, with understanding how incredibly dumb it was to pour his money and what he thought was his heart into super duper expensive crap for his home, and that gosh darned Porsche. He starts trying to create a legacy, leave his mark, and jaunts about for worthy causes. A run-in with a crotchety and horny little donkey leads to soiled trousers and a sheepish disposition, but there: Donkey Sanctuary assisted through sizable donation.
Elsewhere? He meets Allie’s grandfather and his cronies and, while he’s TOTALLY up for assisting them as well, it also sends him into despair. Grandfather has really lived quite a life, and what on earth has Nathan done with his own in comparison?
Wonderful characters (I loved how charmingly and tenderly the oldsters were written!) with slapstick lowbrow humor (Diarrhea gets a nod, scheming evangelists get a nod, free love communes with treacherous beanbag chairs get a nod, that kids’ party clown with anger issues we all know from our own childhoods gets a nod), and I was hooked. Throw in Simon Mattacks with spot-on comedic timing and an ability to switch between characters and to relay female voices very well, and I was all in. EsPECially when The Foodies run amok during their farewell homage to Nathan, and Herman the (grouchy) Potato bellows about spurned love as he staggers all over the stage, teetering and tottering in his gigantic potato costume.
You get the picture in your head? I hope you do as that’s Spalding’s great gift: He gives the reader visuals galore (And Mattacks delivers it all to the Listener’s ear). Some audiobooks leave me wanting to jam an ice pick into areas tainted by text in an effort to “un-see” or “un-hear” certain scenes, and things get awfully crude in a hurry here, but they are scenes to joyfully DIE FOR.
Add to that the fact that quite a few times I got a lump in my throat from sudden emotion, and that by the end I was sniffling into a tissue? Okay, so that’s aNOTHer of Spalding’s great gifts. I remember from his audiobook Fat Chance that I wound up swiping a tear or two away there also. Spalding can just get at the heart of a person’s pain as much as he can chuck embarrassment after all-out embarrassment, and I can’t help it. I’m a sucker for a character stumbling upon their most horrific pain, stumbling upon their discovery of the greater, more empathetic self.
To sum it all up? Checking Out is a reeeeeally twisted When Breath Becomes Air (Which I loved, and I mean no disrespect). It’s every heartfelt memoir of meeting death way too early, meeting it head-on, but with all the bodily indignities that go along with these insanely frail physical carcasses of ours. It’s the hope to live each moment as it comes; it’s the despair that drives one to drink heavily and wind up in Wales three days later, smelling pretty gosh darned ripe.
It’s an AWEsome book, plain and simple. And in these bleak pandemic months (Years?), these times of political upheaval? It’s a freaking breath of fresh air!
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