I admit I bought in to the hype around The Girl on the Train. I heard about it three times in two days and couldn’t resist the summer blockbuster appeal. I bought in to the point of buying the book (something I rarely do what with the existence of libraries and the scarcity of free money), though I got it for $10 as a ‘Heather’s Pick’ at Chapters (my local and fantastic bookshop was sold out and I had to have it Right Now). I’m embarrassed by the whole thing. (Would I be as embarrassed if it had been a better book? Or if J. hadn’t warned me that it wasn’t as great as people were saying?). Continue reading
Tag Archives: book club
The Girl on the Train: Over-hyped, misogynistic nonsense
Filed under Bestseller, Book Club, Popular Posts, Worst Books
The Green Road: What we mean when we say ‘a good book’
Imagine you’ve just finished reading a good book. You put it down and you think to yourself, ‘gosh, that was a really good book’ (okay, you probably don’t say ‘gosh’). You try to put your finger on what made it good. If someone asks you about it, you don’t hesitate to tell them to read it, but you probably don’t go out of your way to recommend it. You think about the characters again for a few days, but then the specificity of their story seeps into a wider feeling you have about the book: it was good.
I’ve just finished Anne Enright’s The Green Road and I can safely report it’s a good book. The writing is at once grand in its capacity and small in its attention on detailed, particular moments. With a compelling use of a shifting third person limited narration, the plot traces the Madigan family over decades. Each long chapter follows one of the four children in a specific moment in time, richly evoking place and character. Each successive chapter moves chronological leaps forward, always toward something. That something is the eventual family reunion when all children are gathered at their childhood home for Christmas.
It wouldn’t be an outrageous argument to claim these chapters are linked short stories, such is the telescopic focus on the one child, the particular time and place. For instance, the (best) chapter following Dan through the gay community in the 1980s, AIDS ravaged New York, is a tight story unto itself. Even while the development of Dan’s character comes to have resonance in the eventual reunion chapter such that this earlier chapter is necessary for the latter, the chapter could be self-contained for its own sake.
To this point on the function of the character-focused chapters: Perhaps because the mother in the story, Rosaleen, does not get a chapter onto herself (in this way the form mirrors the message that she has devoted her sense of self entirely to serving her children), the climactic moments that focus on her feel less pressing than they might had we had time to connect with her first-hand. That said, the children’s reaction to these climactic scenes give the reader a firm sense of the importance and reverberations of the moments.
It’s a good book for exploring questions of familial loyalty, of how and when identity becomes fixed, of who we want to be versus who we might actually be, and of what we owe our family (read ‘owe’ as broadly as you can: what debts we aim to repay, what we have because of them, what obligations are due). These questions get worked out in individual chapters and across the whole with each successive chapter adding layer and echo as the reader comes to piece together both chronology and family hierarchies.
A good book, then, is one that is well written, with strong character development and thematically rich. It’s not a great book because it doesn’t quite leave you shaken, not changed by the beauty of the work or by the questions it explores. This one then is good, and given the profile of Anne Enright, will probably be described as great. You be the judge.
Filed under Book I'll Forget I Read, Booker Prize, Fiction, Prize Winner
The Girls Guide to Hunting and Fishing: If Sex and the City Was Literary Fiction
Melissa Banks’ A Girls Guide to Hunting and Fishing is a novel about a young woman figuring out what she does and does not value about herself, and about her self-in-relationships. It’s a novel that makes the case for ‘being yourself,’ and ‘having experiences,’ and ‘dancing in the rain.’ That’s not fair of me, it’s not that pat – our protagonist Jane Rosenal has nuance and develops. There are touching scenes that left me feeling things (in particular the scenes with her father). I did, however, feel like it was a book trying very hard to be Serious, and Important, and Moving.
If nothing else there’s this one line that will stick with me for a good long time: “Too late, you realize that your body was perfect – every healthy body is” (218). (this from a chapter with second person narration – didn’t I say it was Deliberately Literary?) I know that the sentence privileges ‘healthy bodies’ (and the attendant ideas that go along with ‘health’ and ‘healthy.’) But as someone who complicated feelings about perfect bodies, it was a sharp sentence (amid a chapter about breast cancer no less) that reminded me – and all the 20 somethings the book is aimed at – that the epic struggle to find the perfect body is not Odyssian, but rather Sisyphean. So sure, we’d all be better off recognizing the perfection that is our body when all of its parts are working the way they’re supposed to and/or without pain. And yes, it’s a sentence I’d like to internalize by way of the story that accompanies it. The story tries to get there, tries to show that acceptance of self is the real route to perfect happiness. The only trouble is that for the protagonist here, that real self is one of utter privilege (in all categories) and so acceptance is about accepting yourself as the normative ideal (what’s the hierarchy of self-acceptance?)
All this to say I’m not urging you to go read this one. I think you’d be better off reading Anne of Green Gables. But I would say if you’re a 20 something, or you’re looking for a book for a 20 something, you could do worse than this one.
Side note: I did not realize the book was understood by some to be a collection of linked short stories (aren’t they all?). I obviously would not have read it if that had been the case (see: my long standing and utterly unjustified hatred for short fiction). I don’t think it is, but worth pointing out that Amazon will confuse the genre for you.
Filed under Bestseller, Book I'll Forget I Read, Fiction
Literary Vice 
