What the book suffers the most from (putting aside the diegetic melodrama), is a structural flaw that a good editor could have corrected. I have seen this ruin potentially great works by authors, as diverse as Toni Morrison's aforementioned Beloved and Frank McCourt's series of memoirs, and leave them shells of what they could have been.

Forever runs just over 600 pages, and the first part of Cormac's life (his first three decades) covers a bit more than a quarter of that. The next few hundred pages cover almost 250 years, and the narrative unfortunately detaches from its laser focus on Cormac. The characterization, which till that point, had been excellent and involving (even if a tad melodramatic), then shrivels into minutia punctuated by melodramatic moments, and Cormac becomes just a de facto narrator for the grand flow of history, one of an almost Hugovian sweep.

In an online review by W. R. Greer, the critic states: Pete Hamill's story meanders for centuries, becoming an occasion for name dropping of historical figures and a source of trivia knowledge since Cormac witnesses every important event in Manhattan's history. There is no plot once Cormac is able to live forever, since he purposely avoids any drama in his life. He even comes to this realization himself, remarking 'I have this strange life, but it's not, in the end, strange at all. There is no plot. There is only luck and chance.'

Well, yes and no. The fact that the book loses it way at this point is correct, but not because it lacks plot, and Cormac does not witness every important event in Manhattan's history- he, as a journalist, is merely aware of them, and recounts them in a backwards glance, often compressing celebrities and huge events and focusing on smaller moments. But because there are too many detours, digressions on the town and its landmarks, Dumbest Possible Action tropes, and the heavy hand of foreshadowing- with prior mentions of terrorism, immigration problems, planes flying about overhead, and especially when Cormac's girlfriend gets a job at the World Trade Center, the tale gives away too much of the obvious to come.

The last third of the book, then, is devoted to the year 2001, and the larger geopolitical problems, as well as Cormac's. While the melodramatic love story tanks, the working in of 9/11 is skilled. But, overall, we get a wholly different novel dropped in the middle of the tale of Cormac, and that middle novel is simply dry, and could actually have used a bit of Gumpian wryness.

A further problem is that there's not enough realism — not real realism, in that it's a fantasy novel, but dramatic realism, wherein, despite the fantastic elements, the characters react to them as if they were truly possible. Yet, despite these flaws- things any good editor would have worked with the writer to correct, Forever is a good, solid novel, and well above most of the crap that the MFA writing mill graduates churn out. In fact, one might argue that- given its fatalism, and its hero's survival against the weight of history and supernaturalism, that it is a new form of dystopian novel, but one where the Brave New World is not imposed upon a society from without, but felt by an individual within. In this manner, Hamill may have accidentally developed a template that future writers will hone in one and exploit with greater success.