I've heard good things about Oates and was looking forward to reading this and it is indeed very well written. However, I'm totally conflicted on this book as I don't know if. at any point, I enjoyed reading it or not.
There are a lot of promises made about this book in the blurb and the reviews. I don't think it delivers.
I have almost never used slow as a bad thing when describing a book. Slow paced is frequently the best way to build your cast and your atmosphere and make us care for the characters.
However, this book is glacially slow paced. I would be reading it for an hour, and realise I'd only read 15-20 pages. Considering this book was 453 pages, quite frankly I'm amazed I finished it in only 3 weeks. That's the longest it's taken me to finish a book in several years.
The prose is so dense, light bends around it. There are some sequences of great writing, but it's never a quick or easy read.
The story follows a family - the Mulvaneys, who live in a farm on the outskirts of a small town in 70s America (New York State). The father - Michael Sr - is a successful self-made businessman who runs his own roofing firm. He's a social climber and one of his proudest achievements is getting accepted into the local country club. His wife - Corrinne - potters about with running the farm and an antiques business from one of their outhouses, which is treated more as a hobby and excuse for her to collect worn out oddities than a serious attempt at money making.
They have 4 children, Mike Jr (aka Mule), a successful high school athlete, Patrick, the brainy one and possibly autistic, Marianne the beautiful daughter and popular cheerleader in the school, and Judd, the alleged narrator and youngest in the clan.
I say alleged narrator because of the sheer quantity of inner thoughts he describes for the rest of the family that he has no real way of even guessing at and the fact that he refers to himself in third person for most of the book.
Oates spends a long time setting up this almost perfect family and their rituals before Marianne is assaulted and, bit by bit, the foundations of the family crumble and it all falls to pieces.
The book was written well enough that I kept reading, despite the snailpace of the storytelling. But on reflection, I can't honestly say I was ever emotionally involved with the story. Everything is so dry and impersonal, even when it occasionally switches to first person.
I'm not sure any of the characters were particularly well drawn except for the mother. The father was particularly one dimensional. Corinne is too cliche mother hen although her complicity with her husband against her daughter makes her slightly more complex (and a lot less likeable). Mule was shipped off out of the story at the earliest convenience without ever impacting on the storyline. Patrick's story arc is strange at best and unconvincing. Given the level of detail in Marianne's character early on, her later storyline seems to just pick random segments from her life and feels, not rushed, but certainly incomplete. The story is written by the adult Judd who is apparently a journalist by trade. However, the book certainly does not read as if a journalist
The point was raised last night that the attitudes on display in the book seemed to belong to the 50s and not the 70s. Maybe rural New York state is a few decades behind... i don't know.
There's a paucity of incident in the book. The only section with any real drama is the section where Patrick plans his revenge. The pace did pick up in this bit of the book, but the revenge is slightly anti-climactic. The chapter headings for the last three chapters give away the ending of the book.
It's a real contradiction. I can find nothing to really praise about the book except the writing, and even that is so dense it makes it a difficult read. I scored it a 7 at the book group last night because I couldn't in good conscience score it lower because of the prose. But if I was to score it on compelling storyline and character, I think it would be a 4.
On technical merit, this is a good book. By almost any other metric, it isn't.
No comments:
Post a Comment