(Spoilers ahead) Kristin Hannah’s The Women looked like a book I would not like. But so many best of lists promised greatness (and marketers did their best with prominently featured placement on shelves at book stores) and so I went in for it. And I should know enough of what I like now to have known better. Alas. Here we are 500 pages later and this will not be a popular post because everyone else on the internet loves this book, so okay, hate me and move on.
Why do they like it? Well as historical fiction mashed with romance it has genre going for it. With a plucky heroine in Frankie McGrath who follows a character arc we just know – we just know – from the outset is going to be fine in the end despite all the Trials and Tribulations we have character going for it. Add in the unbeatable combination of the untold story of American women in the Vietnam War with an almost-critical-but-never-quite-unpatriotic view on the American role and we have plot and theme.
And sure. There’s appreciation for the centralizing – from the boldness of the tile allllll the way through – of the role of women in the war and the way their experience after the war was forgotten, marginalized or dismissed. And how women, don’t you know, just stick together and are there for one another. And there’s something to be said for the propulsive first part that has Frankie in Vietnam with plot and character developments fast and fierce.
But from the moment Jamie’s near-dead body gets on the plane I knew. I just knew there was no way this book was ending with anything short of a miraculous resolution where Frankie and Jamie would end up together and ride off into the sunset. And while the sunset doesn’t quite materialize, the end is exactly that – a triumphant tying up of all loose threads into something more than a bow, something like an artistic arrangement where every string has become a thing of beauty.
I don’t know. Is it wrong to dislike a book for being so obviously saccharine? For being so outrageously committed to making sure Everything Works Out? When – and here’s an obvious point – for most in the Vietnam War everything did not work out.
Better and other complaints could be in the boring writing that is straightforwardly narrative with little to get excited about. Or the wooden secondary characters that are only present to do their specific secondary character thing – an emotionally dead mother, a traditional father, a consistent and steadfast best friend, a rakish boyfriend, an honourable fiancé – YAWN – with nary a complexity to their name. Or that the politics of the book is bland and ultimately committed to American exceptionalism.
So learn from my mistakes. Do not be drawn in by the prominent placement on any table or any best of list. This is one to skip.
Literary Vice 