While I respect the knowledge of science writers and their efforts to educate and inform, sometimes their efforts fall flat. Could be that Mary Roach’s other books are funny while being informative, but this one sure didn’t inspire me to find out if they are. Of course my reaction can merely be a mismatch. What one person thinks is funny can be insipid to another. I admire her success and her efforts, all of which are to be commended.
Fuzz is laden with incomplete, dull, and repetitive supposedly humorous antidotes. Roach sounds like a guest speaker at a Middle School trying to impress disinterested teens and preteens, throwing in a cuss word here or there to prove her authenticity, straining to prove she’s cool while the kids make immature jokes about her name. When she’s not trying to be funny, she sounds like a narrator for an exceedingly dull nature show. The descriptions of offices, the drone of the obvious, and the lame attempts at humor make Fuzz difficult to slog through.
The extended metaphor of animals as offenders seems forced, required by the title, itself a bad pun. By the end, the metaphor is lost in the buzz, and here, this review’s “buzz” mimicry may or may not illustrate the point, but I’m forcing it in anyway. Yes, we are constantly trying to share space with animals, and Mary Roach presents some of the informative, clever, and potentially humorous ways in which societies around the world are trying to do that. Good effort and worthy of admiration.
