smaldesign

There was very little in this book to scoop me up or draw me in. I thought it was rather banal and ultimately resided in the upper end of the guppy pool. Deeply superficial. It was billed as DeLillo-esque, which is why I wanted to read it. It tanked. When writing about obscenely rich navel-gazers, it helps to be fresh and original. I enjoy essentially unlikable characters in literature--they are often savagely solipsistic and subversive. Tom Wolfe, Martin Amis and Zoe Heller create self-regarding characters with a literary elan. It was the pasty cardboard cutouts that irked me; Adam and Cynthia were conspicuously thin and stale. Within the text, Dee advances his theories of manufactured art ruining culture in this day and age, but he didn't really give us something fresh-out-of-the-wrapper, either. Maybe he was being cheeky, but it fell flat to me. The second part of the novel, once Cynthia and Adam have been established as scheming masters of the universe, highlights their children, Jonas and April. April doesn't do one unexpected thing or have two original thoughts. Jonas tugged at me for a while with his ambivalence and innocent pretense. His lofty cynicism and earnest ideology had a guileless streak, which gave him some dimension. But, almost abruptly, he unraveled into stream of consciousness nothingness. There was a hospice scene toward the end that was authentic and effective. I know this from working as a hospice nurse for many years. The author captured the helpless fury and the meek awkwardness. The saliva in my throat burned and I was there with the characters. Dee either did his research or experienced this personally. However, the ending (following the hospice scene) was grandiose and melodramatic. It rattled hysterically and left a stream of synthetic fibers everywhere.

2022-10-29 03:26