Shannon 's Reviews > The Beach House

Three couples, a tangle of cheating relationships and an old beach house in Nantucket, scene of much healing and new beginnings. When I say that in my head I sound pretty snarky. Perhaps I was expecting something a bit more clever, funny even - definitely something with more heart. Instead I got a cold, robotic story about awful people and their woe-is-me midlife crises - written in present tense, no less, which is guaranteed to annoy me.

Nan is an ageing widow living in a big old house on 9 acres of prime land overlooking the beach on Nantucket Island, the only thing left to her after her husband drowned himself in the ocean decades ago, leaving her with an unexpected amount of gambling debt to deal with. She has one son, Michael, a jeweller in New York who is having an affair with his married boss, Jordana. After a meeting with her accountant who makes Nan realise she has no money coming in, certainly not for the expensive and extensive repairs the beach house needs, she comes up with a plan to rent out rooms during the summer.

Daniel is the first person to arrive: his marriage to Bee is on the rocks as he struggles to understand why, despite loving her, he doesn't want to be intimate with her. After finally admitting to himself that he's gay, he comes to stay at Nan's beach house in order to be close to his two little girls, who are holidaying with Bee at another rented property in the same town.

The other boarder is Daff, a forty-one year old housewife who's husband, Richard, had an affair with a woman at work. Their divorce is final but their daughter, Jess, isn't dealing with it well: she blames her mother (especially considering how Richard implied it was Daff's fault he wasn't living with them anymore). After establishing herself as a real estate agent, Daff finds herself sorely in need of a holiday and some "me" time.

And Nan's son Michael turns up, having walked out of his job and his affair with Jordana as soon as she left her husband, his other boss Jackson, in the mistaken belief that they're in love and Michael wants to live with her. Jordana is a polished yuppy with expensive tastes who thinks she wants to give up her consumeristic lifestyle and life more simply, but Michael knows Jordana can't and won't and will instead seek to do what all his other girlfriends do: change him and his apartment. So he flees to Nantucket where a shocking surprise awaits.

I really don't have much good to say about this book. It's predictable, the characters are stereotypes I couldn't relate to, it uses present tense just because, it's rather depressing really, and quite vacuous. It has a chick-lit kind of cover, but it's not chick-lit. Looking at the quotes on the back cover while I type this, I'm surprised to see comments like "A sweet, uplifting story", "a must-read summer delight" and "fresh and sparkling". Were we reading the same book?

Part of the problem was the characters: they were unreal to me. The men are all middle-aged, successful businessmen and work (and cheating on their wives) seems to be all they do - that and play golf. The women are all housewives - not even full-time mothers, but the kind of housewives who expect to be looked after, financially; I have no idea what they do with their time but when their marriages die (and the cow in me sees part of the problem with their marriages being that the couple have no common ground anymore, and nothing to talk about, their lives being so repetitive and boring), they're left floundering with no skills or experience. I don't really understand how Daff so easily set herself up as a real estate agent.

But all I could ask myself was, Who the hell are these people? I kind of see them as myths, not real people. I found them offensive simply for being. The book is full of gender stereotypes and two-dimensional people, and lines like this:

"You're sorry?" [Bee] attempts a laugh again, still bitter, mirthless. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry I didn't listen to all my friends before we got married. Everyone told me they thought you were gay and I told them they were ridiculous, you were just sensitive, in touch with your feminine side. I can't believe how stupid I was." [p.224]

(Because, of course, any man who doesn't enjoy standing around with a bunch of other boring, golf-playing, yuppy moronic men discussing football is, of course, gay. Just goes without saying really.)

And this:

He would build what all the new money wants these days. Their interpretation of a beach cottage, but for millionaires. Gunite pools, high-speed covers to keep their small children safe, kitchens that are equipped with everything, even though it is rare for the wives to actually cook. [p.335]

(Because, of course, only women cook. No sorry, only wives could possibly be expected to cook.)

I don't even know what a "gunite" pool is, but honestly, the level of yuppy wank in this novel was nauseating. It's like yuppy name-dropping, coming across all the little details of their polished, vacuous lives. Everyone comes across this way, even - to a degree - Nan herself. She was written to be mildly eccentric, energetic and the life of a party even in her 60s, but she just came across as annoying and silly, not with the dignity she was meant to portray. It wouldn't even matter if Green were parodying these people - which she isn't; simply having them occupy over three hundred pages of very mundane "real life" drama would have cancelled out any attempt at a piss-take. No, these people are treated with care and compassion. With sympathy.

And the "shocking surprise" that comes towards the end? The "unexpected visitor who turns their lives upside down"? So very predictable, and so very convenient in terms of how it worked out. In general, even aside from the pointless use of present tense, I found the writing style to be rather alienating. It is a distinctly "tell" style, leaving you with very little to infer (though you can guess Daniel is gay from the get-go). The omniscient narrator who held my hand all the way through gets to be tiresome and condescending.

And then there's the let-down regarding this as a potentially good summer beach read. I don't get why a book about a bunch of miserable consumeristic rich people dissatisfied with their empty lives and cheap affairs is considered a fun summer beach read. There wasn't even any beach in the story, really. An attempt was made to make the house a focal point of the story, but Green failed to make it a character as well. And I found myself rolling my eyes at the romance between Daniel and Daff - I don't feel like that's a spoiler because there was a big neon arrow pointing at it all the way through.

It was a bit of an effort to finish the book, and a shame to say I don't have anything very positive to say about it. In fact, I can't think of anything positive right now. I originally gave it 2 out of 5 when I first finished it, but I think I was just grateful to have finished the book. If I didn't like the characters, I didn't like the prose, I didn't like their dramas and I found it boring, I can't in all good conscience rate it higher than a 1.