Bream Gives me Hiccups by Jesse Eisenberg

I got this book on recommendation from Gleebooks and I was disappointed. It’s a collection of short stories, if you can call them that, snippets and conversations all trying to be painfully witty and clever and postmodern. It’s a quick and relatively easy read if you can put up with it. I ploughed through, skipping great wads of it towards the end. This guy is an actor (played Zuckerberg in the film about Facebook) and script/screen writer and you can tell, as there is nothing literary about his style. His content is self indulgent teenaged conversations, between therapy sessions of which he seems inordinately proud. The first section, the bit about the bream, is vaguely entertaining as it charts the progress of a kid whose mother is in payback mode to the father who has abandoned her, and so takes him to restaurants because Dad has said he’ll pay for anything the kids does. But its smart-arsed and irritating overall.