“Setting your childhood home on fire. That seemed like some symbolically heavy shit.” One of the many, *many* blistering insights on parenthood, found“Setting your childhood home on fire. That seemed like some symbolically heavy shit.” One of the many, *many* blistering insights on parenthood, found family, and generational trauma you can find in this slim novel.
After all, why use lot word when few word do trick? Someone get this man a fucking thesaurus.
Was very unsurprised to discover this novel was written in 10 days. It fucking shows. ...more
More scattered and distant than The Year of Magical Thinking, even the repetitive rhythm of the prose falling into a numbness rather than demonstratinMore scattered and distant than The Year of Magical Thinking, even the repetitive rhythm of the prose falling into a numbness rather than demonstrating deepening self-reflection or revealing new insights. The name-dropping and posturing is much more prominent here too—though it hadn’t bothered me in Magical Thinking, it was alienating and off-putting here. Where was Quintana in these pages?
But perhaps this book is actually far more successful than it initially feels—it’s a brilliant example of someone stuck in the throes of grief, having failed to find meaning in it, being passively pushed back and forth in the tides of aging and fear and loss without end. A meditation without an invitation to the reader. A living relic of a creative searching for and losing her words. In some ways, maybe that’s the most appropriate form for a memoir on the loss of a child. ...more
Clever, yes, well-written until it wasn’t, but so self-satisfied and attached to its conceit it almost stopped me from reaching the beauty and horror Clever, yes, well-written until it wasn’t, but so self-satisfied and attached to its conceit it almost stopped me from reaching the beauty and horror of the very few real moments of clarity. I usually love multiple timelines/POV and experimental form, but this felt like an extended writing exercise (including the many, many quirky villagers with extravagant backstories that read like flash fiction and meandering bouts of philosophizing that sounded good until you spent more than three seconds wondering what they actually mean—loving our love more than loving the object of our love, okay). I enjoyed some of it and one chapter toward the end in particular really moved me, but I’m left overall feeling cold and a little annoyed by the experience ...more
I was not the intended audience for this book. I found it so utterly tiresome and about as subtle as a sledgehammer. Weird pacing, melodramatic, poor I was not the intended audience for this book. I found it so utterly tiresome and about as subtle as a sledgehammer. Weird pacing, melodramatic, poor character work, cringe-worthy dialogue, shallow insights, nonsensical plot, just…ugh. I know it’s well loved, and I know why it’s well loved, but it was so hard to get through for me. Another entry in the “it’s not you, it’s me, well it’s also kind of you too” category. (If you loved this, my review is not an indictment of you in any way, I swear) ...more
This felt like a lesser version of The Corrections—the story spirals out from a single family’s precarious financial position (and asks us, somehow, tThis felt like a lesser version of The Corrections—the story spirals out from a single family’s precarious financial position (and asks us, somehow, to sympathize with their suburban melodrama) but this time we are treated to not just a cast of unbearable characters, but unbearable characters PLUS a preachy mouthpiece that I think is supposed to rehabilitate the family’s image (not all rich people are bad, you see? some of them feel guilty for being rich). I mean we have the mostly absent but long-suffering patriarch, the overbearing and martyred matriarch, the gaggle of children with the strange predilections and entitlements that only rich entitled kids have…it was too close for comfort for me, having only barely tolerated The Corrections. But at least The Corrections had prose that felt like it mattered, and some moments of insight or humor that genuinely made me sit up and notice. This story didn’t really have that for me, and so I can say only, it was okay, and having finished it, I probably will not think of it again. ...more
Loading...
