What will happen to you when your wife dies?

So John and Lorraine are two kids at the local high school. The book begins with a death: John say the Pigman dies. Quickly the book alternates narrators; during one chapter John is the narrator, during the next Lorraine is the narrator. And here is the only problem with the novel: the story is quite powerful as it forces you to consider death and loneliness, but at the same time it is somewhat difficult to digest, because the kids write in the language of kids from the 60’s, and they alternate narrators. Originally I was going with four stars because the book is so choppy in the narration, but the emotion, and the thought-provoking question of what happens to a person when his spouse dies, is so powerful I think I’ll end up with five.

There is a story called A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce that I have not yet been able to finish, despite it having been in my library for more than a year. And the reason I have not been able to finish it is that the beginning at least, is about a child, so Joyce writes like a child. There is a lack of punctuation, a lack of sentences, a lack of paragraphs, and this makes the text extremely difficult to read.

The Pigman is similar: the story is about two young children as they mature with a lonely, grown man. But it is narrated by the children and thus follows their language skills. The main problem with this is that the narrators tend to go off into tangents, and this tends to add some distractions. Yet while the novel becomes a little more choppy than the average Dickens novel, it is not so difficult to digest.

This particular style tends to deepen the characters. For one thing, when we finally meet the Pigman, Mr. Pignati, we do not just get one point of view as to what type of character he is. Instead we get a young man’s point of view (John’s) and a young woman’s point of view (Lorraine’s). This is important: the Pigman is a very complex character - he has just lost his wife, and now he must deal with it. This is the true story of the book - how Mr. Pignati deals with his wife's death.

In addition to the depth of Mr. Pignati's character, John and Lorraine's characters are deepened by the narration method as well. We do not just have reactions of other characters to judge John and Lorraine, but we have their own admission of their own insecurities. When you get to the end, it the depth of the characters, and the feelings they have, that really add to the impact.

This impact – the impact of the ending - is rather immense. The story of the book is really about loneliness. First there are two lonely children. But more important then this is the loneliness of Mr. Pignati – a man so lonely that his only friend is a monkey at the zoo. Reading that, and the conclusion of the novel, really adds a powerful message: how sad I it to be lonely? What is the ultimate loneliness? And the worst question of all - what would happen to me if I lost my wife?

As the story develops we see what happens to lonely people. We see what happens to young people who are lonely – life goes on. And we see what happens to older people who lose their spouses. Truly this book focuses on loneliness as an emotion better than any other novel I have read. And it is that loneliness: the focus on loneliness, and the author’s interpretation of what happens when we become lonely, that makes the book so powerful.

One more thing I will add: I can say that when I first picked up this book I hesitated to read it, because I thought that Pigman referred to some slanderous term for somebody, perhaps somebody with a deformation. In fact, it refers to the gentleman’s name: Mr. Pignati, and the fact that he has a collection of small pigs. In this respect, the book surprised me.

After I had finished the novel, I realized that it was a very powerful story about loneliness. When I finished it I had to think for a while about myself and my own death. I had to consider my family, the thought of losing them, and the loneliness that would create. This, the ability to force me to think after I have read the story, is the mark of a powerful story. The disruptions of the narration might start to remove a star, but the story remains very powerful. Five stars for being a very good and powerful story, despite its unusual narration.