Bibliophile – Can’t You Get Along With Anyone?: A Writer’s Memoir and Tale of a Lost Surfer’s Paradise by Allan C Weisbecker

A long-awaited follow up to the excellent In Search of Captain Zero, AC Weisbecker’s third book has been a long time coming. I never knew what to expect but, based on the title, I figured it’d be another well-written story loosely based around surfing and his personal relationships. Instead, Weisbecker dropped the surfing and added more relationship. The result is dissapointing.

In Zero, Weisbecker recounted his days of running marijuana across U.S. borders back in the seventies and tied these accounts into a tale of the search for a long lost friend. He also wrote eloquent passages about surfing and interspersed them throughout the book. Gone is that eloquence, replaced by laborious accounts of his relationship with a slovenly girlfriend and her many infidelities.

He also inexplicably adds his insight and experiences in Hollywood. He doesn’t stop there in this misguided trainwreck, adding yet one more storyline consisting of a long drawn out account about real estate conflicts in Costa Rica. If it sounds schizophrenic, it is. Weisbecker could have written two books out of this one and still managed to lose the aggravatingly annoying bullshit about the slutty girlfriend. It’s ironic because he devotes at least three chapters to bitching about his editor for Zero and her overbearing editing that “plagued” his last book. The reality is, he should have hired her for this book and then he might have two new books, both infinitely stronger. Plus, we wouldn’t be subjected to his soap opera of a love life with a woman he inexplicably stays with for two years even while he knows she’s fucking half the town. In short, if you are a Weisbecker fan, don’t read this, it may ruin him for you the way it did for me. Hopefully, future books from Weisbecker will revisit the genius of his previous work. – Mike Berard