“How many of those Nazi bastards did you kill?” General Patton asked, squinting in eyeball-to-eyeball contact with the stiffly standing, erect, and at-attention sergeant.

No, that’s not a line from some bizarre gay porno set in World War II. It’s actually a quote from James Michael Pratt’s The Lighthouse Keeper, and believe me, that’s just one of the many gems scattered throughout the book, all of them equally awkward and most of them unintentionally hilarious. The book made me chuckle so much, I almost feel bad about giving it an F. Almost.

The plot is fragmented and messy – and not in a good way, either. But even with the constant jumps in point of view and time, it’s still remarkably predictable. The basic premise is this: Peter O’Banyon is a terminal cancer patient who feels compelled to narrate his life story to Kathleen, his daughter. We know immediately that it’s supposed to be a two-hanky read because Peter practically tells us so. Almost everyone is going to die, and die tragically, and Peter is going to deliver an inspirational lesson at the end. During this supposed narrative, we get not only Peter’s life story, but also that of his Uncle Billie (who took care of Peter when his parents died in a truck accident). Although the perspective should have been limited because of the narrative device employed, we get a dizzying array of viewpoints, including those of Peter, Billie, Anna (Peter’s wife), sundry WWII soldiers, and Laddie, Uncle Billie’s dog. We get an omniscient narrator, a first-person narrator, and various third-person limited narrators, sometimes in the same chapter.

Many of the major events are glossed over or summarized, which makes the action in the book seem very jerky. I thought matters like the development of Peter’s relationship with Billie in the early years would have been given an emphasis. Instead, we jump to Billie’s story and how he copes with the tragedies in his life. Then we jump back to Peter, with a few paragraphs devoted to an impossibly idyllic childhood, then to his courtship of Anna, then on to his experiences in World War II and his final, greatest tragedy. The book’s ending drips with New-Age nondenominational spiritual psychobabble, but at least it’s consistent with the rest of the novel.

The characterization is so vague that it’s not even two-dimensional. Motivations are unclear or presented so badly that the characters come across as unconvincing. For example, Billie meets his wife, Katie, when she approaches him out of the blue at a park on a Sunday. They start talking, and before you know it, they’re married and having children. In the first place, I find it hard to believe that a “nice” Irish girl would approach a good-looking stranger alone in a park, not in pre-World War I New York, anyway. They are both working-class people, but the proprieties were probably stricter than if they had come from higher on the social ladder, especially given the time period. And because everything happens so quickly, it’s hard to believe in the supposedly strong connection the characters have with each other.

Everyone is also unbearably good, and everything they say is unbearably saccharine. The characters rail against God (because of those awful, awful tragedies – did I mention that this is supposed to be a two-hanky inspirational read?), but never do they rail at each other. Every other phrase they utter is “I love you,” or “You sweet man.” Even the nutty Italian-American tank driver (you gotta have a nutty Italian of some sort in a WWII story) uses the illicit proceeds from his gambling to help wartime orphans. To add insult to injury, all the Irish people speak like the Lucky Charms leprechaun, dropping g’s like there’s no tomorrow and saying “ta” instead of “to” and “ya” instead of “you.” The characters even write to each other in the same fake brogue.

But the worst aspect of the book has to be the way it soundly abuses English. Redundancies abound, the sentence structures are a mess, and the author seems to suffer from a terminal case of adjectivitis. Even the few phrases that have a nice ring to it are spoiled by over-explanation, like “The night’s cloak had worn thin as evidenced by the rising sun on the eastern horizon.” Sundry words are misspelled, the punctuation is spotty at best, and at one point I felt like yelling, “The past tense of ‘lead’ is ‘led,’ not ‘lead’!” Some of the sentences are actually incoherent. The book strives to be poetic, but it fails spectacularly.

The Lighthouse Keeper is a direct descendant of the 19th-century sentimental novel, only even more insufferable and without any redeeming literary value. If you like reading bad books for camp value or would like a lesson on how not to construct an English sentence, you might want to check it out. Otherwise, fahgeddahboudit!