My wife got this book from the library because it is on the schedule for her ladies book club. When she decided to abandon it, she suggested that I try as I was running low on readily available new books. If only to prove a point, I read to the end, although if I had not been in lockdown, I would have given up after a few pages.The author was a well-known Pulitzer prize-winning American-Canadian novelist, playwright, poet and feminist who died in 2003.
The first person singular narrator is an aspiring novelist, married to a family physician in Orangetown, north of Toronto (read Orangeville), shaken by a daughter who leaves for university then suddenly and inexplicably takes up the life of a mute street beggar in Toronto, in 2000. So far I have not revealed any of the implausible plot that is not revealed on the jacket.
Fond of angry feminist man-bashing,(while denying being angry) the narrator seems to lump almost all men except her husband into one evil cohort of misogynistic beasts. There are abundant reasons for women as a group to rail against the oppression and unequal treatment they have suffered throughout history, but feminists do themselves no favour by denying that there are many decent men in the world. To be fair, she does a good job of pointing out the many discriminations women experience that are not obvious to most men, such as a (male) literary reviewer selecting only male writer’s works to review. And she has an editor of her novel insisting on making a man, rather than a woman the hero of the story. It is easy to see the appeal of this writing to large numbers of downtrodden, systemically-disadvantaged women, but ‘the lady doth protest methinks.’ As a good friend (a lady) said when discussing this writing, “Stop the whining.”
The rabid feminism is only a minor part of why I did not like this book. There is endless nostalgic, melodramatic, self-pitying, introspective self-analyses. And I am really tired of fiction writers writing about other fiction writers writing about writing. The mostly one-word chapter headings, all conjunctions, made no sense to me, even when I tried to unscramble them, even though they are apparently in some profound way, the very essence of life. Most of a chapter is devoted to the seemingly very difficult but (to me) banal task of picking out a scarf in a row of boutiques in Washington, D.C. The attempts to seem erudite fall flat. “Whenever, and for whatever reason, these words fall into my vision, I feel my breath stuck in my chest like an eel I’ve swallowed whole.” “This thought pulsed in my throat.” My understanding of basic human anatomy and physiology is insulted.
I simply cannot recommend this novel.
The Passionate Reader 