June 29, 2013 · 2:58 am

Mr Peanut: Hates Women

I think Adam Ross thinks that *Mr Peanut* isn’t a novel about hating women. I also think maybe Ross thought he had to be overly simplistic and overly didactic in theme because otherwise his reader might not get it.  The reason I think Adam Ross thinks this way and not the speaker or a character is that *Mr Peanut* is as much a book about metafiction as it is a meditation on gender, matrimony and identity. 

The novel opens with a brilliant montage of possible ways a wife could die. The images set up the premise of the novel: husbands (note: not partners, but definitely male spouses) want their wives to disappear, and the easiest (or least imaginative) way for that to happen is for them to die.

I don’t think Adam Ross trusts the reader to be very clever, because the rest of the novel belabours this premise with repetitious lines like “if only she would disappear,” or “she became invisible” or “she disappeared” or “she vanished.” These direct statements are couple with the none-to-metaphorical “disappearance” of Alice as she loses 200 pounds or the growing invisibility of whatsherface as she takes on jobs outside the home. 

Where the novel is brilliant is in the nesting of the detective’s narrative within the murder mystery – a doubling of mysteries that resonates into the readers present as a matryoshka doll where eventually you are meant to lose track of who the narrator is and wonder/realize that we’re all meant to either want to kill/disappear our wives, or we are all women on our way to being replaced/disappeared.

And why erase women? Principally, it seems, because we are bodily. We have materiality – blood, fluids, gases – that make us inconvenient distractions from the pursuits of the mind: fantasy, abstraction, *metafiction*. The male mind – taken to such abstraction as to be avatars (hammered home again in the last line of the novel *as if we didn’t get it* from David’s job as a video game designer and the repeated descriptions of him enacting GTA-like adventures with voluptuous women). The contrast of the bleeding (heart) women with the obtuse/abstruse (purposefully juxtaposed here) men serves no thoughtful purpose. That is to say, I’m okay, or at least willing to entertain, a reductionist rendering of gender if it *does something interesting*, if it draws attention, or asks a question, or forces us to look again. But this rendering of the gender dynamic – for all the self-congratulatory self-awareness our author seems to possess – appears to take place without recognition of its gross essentialism.   

So while I enjoyed moments of *Mr Peanut* for being clever, I was, overall, dissatisfied because the novel didn’t trust *me* to be clever: far too much explaining, too much symbolic/dialogue repetition of key themes, far too little in the way of mystery for a book purportedly a murder mystery. And while I enjoyed the exploration of men’s perversity and the unsettling realization that our lives are *not* unfolding in multiple universes (with as many iterations as there are attempts to play a video game) nor are they unfolding with the glamour of a video game – I found the essentialist rendering of gender to be both uninteresting and offensive.

And not offensive because I am a feminist, but offensive because I’m a smart reader. 

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June 4, 2013 · 1:24 pm

The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared: TERRIBLE

I tried for THREE WEEKS to read *The Hundred Year Old Man Who Fell Out the Window and Disappeared* and while I got 150 pages into the text I couldn’t finish it. It was just so useless. The plot – a 100 year old man (Alan) flees his nursing home, steals a suitcase full of millions of dollars, and is pursued by the millions owners. Meanwhile (in the style of a 4 year old picture book) Alan pick up characters along the way creating a menagerie of misfits. Recipe for humour maybe, but in this case a recipe for annoyance and boredom. Interspersed with the chapters of Alan and misfits we have episodes of Alan’s life – like Forrest Gump we have him show up in the major historical moments of the last century. Not only is this implausible but the plotting makes Alan nothing more than a game piece without his own character depth, development or interest.

It all combined to a be a book where nothing much seemed to happen, waiting for the plot to get going was too much. I stopped reading it. And I’m not apologizing for it. Even though this book came recommended from J. and usually she gets it bang on. And this was just The Worst. Sorry J. 

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May 1, 2013 · 11:43 pm

Daughter of the Forest: Strong Female Protagonist?

I liked a lot of things about Juliet Marillier’s *Daughter of the Forest*: the first person narration of Sorcha, the bildungsroman plot, the subtle but convincing romance narrative, the retelling of Grimm’s *Six Swans* (a story I couldn’t recall the end to and so was allowed the mystery of the climax) and the magic of nature/women that suffuses character and plot. 

I don’t read an awful lot of fantasy and so my read of this one may be hampered by this limitation. I did, however, find myself slightly annoyed that by all appearances and actions Sorcha – and her brothers – are flawless characters/heroes. Without exception each of them possesses unique powers, admirable strengths and characteristics and can do no wrong – even when doing very, very, wrong. A little character complexity never killed a story.

I was also annoyed that the central problem of the narrative – that Sorcha’s six brothers have been turned into swans and she must sew them shirts from nettle flowers without speaking a word to anyone – is introduced with the most illogical and sparse of explanations. Almost without introduction a witch – Oonagh – arrives and marries their father. Then just as hastily a spell is cast – how? why? with what means? – and the brothers are swans. I fully appreciate that magic operates in the narrative – and I’m fine with that – but without meeting Oonagh in a substantive way and understanding her motivations the spell reads as a far too convenient way for the problem of swan-brothers to take place. 

What I *did* love with the slow and unpredictable introduction of the romance with Red (though in a similar vein to my complaints about Oonagh I found Simon’s revelation of love to be completely without precedent or foreshadow). I believed their romance, I wanted them to find and love one another, I wanted them to be happy. I was quite content with the conclusion to the novel that allowed the ‘happily ever after’ with the tiny qualifiers that lead to the next book in the series, but *not* as is often the case with fantasy, the cliff-hanger ending that compels an immediate read of the next book in the series. 

I do have some questions about the “strong female character” here. For all her courage and bravery in making the shirts, all of Sorcha’s decisions are in response to the commands of a patriarchal figure. If not her father or brothers than the “queen” of the forest who acts in the same capacity by commanding Sorcha down a particular path that disregards her desires or aspirations. Complicating this structure are the few scenes when the brothers, with extreme lack-luster, offer to remain as swans so she doesn’t have to endure such torment (torment that extends to a very problematic rape scene). And her response – that of course she will endure the torment because she loves them – is unsatisfactory because this reader was never convinced it was a genuine choice. 

So yes – great pleasure in reading this book – I could scarce put it down (thanks E. for the recommendation!), but in my enjoyment questions about the politics and plotting of an otherwise captivating tale.  

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April 25, 2013 · 8:52 pm

The Purchase: Unlikeable Characters

In my biased view, Linda Spalding had an exciting plot to work with: Quaker settlers head to Virginia to set up house and farm and have to reconcile their beliefs with slavery, greed and “American” individualism. All the trappings of a terrific plot: cold winters, butter churns, trading pigs with neighbours and miserable wives. And gosh darn’it but those settlers make the most of their tired (but well loved by me) plot line: they struggle, they suffer loses, they compromise, they prosper. Oh sure, the compromises are meant to be fraught and compelling: how does the Quaker father make sense of his sons enlisting? or buying slaves? or his daughter engaging in sex out of wedlock?

But because We Don’t Care At All About the Characters it’s hard to care about these apparent moral/plot crises. We’re meant – I think – to be horrified that Mary continues to enslave Bett when she’s bound, by faith and promise, to free her. But I don’t know anything about Mary – what does she like? why does she fall in love with Wiley? what makes her happy? sad? – and so her decision is just as believable to me as if she had carried Bett to freedom herself (which, by the way, she ends up doing – with no apparent change in character to make sense of this radical shift). Instead the novel makes heavy handed declarations like “this (moment) (bird on the window) (breakfast of porridge) changed everything for Mary” and then suddenly she’s off doing something entirely different. I can’t even say something “out of character” because I don’t know anything about her character. And then! The father, Daniel, I only know to do the exact, predictable thing his character is set up to do. So if the characters aren’t entirely opaque they are entirely wooden. Blerg.

I may be belabouring my argument now, but let me just say again that the potential of this plot – and there is potential! – is all but lost in the mire of terrible character development. Too bad.

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