nicomiot

I thought the book had promise, not least of all because it's Jami Attenberg and she's written several short stories and essays I really liked. It had moments that I could relate to, as a woman who was married young to a...let's call him "difficult." You know, the kind of person who has difficulty conceiving of other people with needs and ideas that exist outside of their own concepts of themselves. It's easy to get sucked into a relationship with a person like that, and I thought Attenberg capably described the way it slowly erodes your sense of self until you don't know where your partner ends and you begin. There were also moments when I thought I could see the barest outlines take shape of a portrait of a young woman who'd never really bothered to learn what she wanted out of life, simply because she'd been willing to accept whatever had been placed in front of her with no critical thought. But sparks of promise and interest cannot make up for what ultimately ended up being a fairly weak book. The book suffered from what I'm going to start calling the "fuck-it" syndrome, where the author seems to get sick of her characters and her story and wraps the whole thing up in a tidy bow in fifteen pages or less. It often leaves me feeling cheated, because I hung in there with the author through the first 200-300 pages of set-up and character development and plot and then my reward is a whole pile of facile nothingness. Maybe I could have forgiven these things if I liked the narrator at all, but I really didn't. She seemed unnaturally naive - I mean, I know she's a farm girl from Nebraska and all but just because someone is from a small Midwestern town doesn't mean they are an idiot - and her lack of a substantial inner life irritated me. Maybe I am wrong to think everyone can be interesting in their own way, that even the most pedestrian, mainstream, unambitious person can still have little tingles of specialness somewhere inside. Maybe that's my problem, that I figure almost everyone had those unexpected parts of their personality. Ultimately a pretty disappointing book. Wanted to like it more than I did.

2022-12-07 22:56