"He was born a nobody and that's how he would die," the narrator writes, trying to inhabit the mind of the man in his 68th year and on his fifth marriage. He's also, the narrator explains, "a big fat fraud," a half-assed dreamer whose business schemes never come to fruition. The titular character is an investment adviser living in suburban Chicago who manages funds for retirees. There's no shortage of make-believe in A Calling for Charlie Barnes, Ferris' fifth, and best, book. Or as the narrator of Joshua Ferris' dazzling new novel puts it: "Every story we tell ourselves is some version of make-believe." That's not to say that your parents lied when they told you, say, how they met, but time has a way of distorting memories, and fiction replaces fact in our minds seamlessly and subconsciously. Every family is a group of unreliable narrators.
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