Rachel’s Holiday, by Marian Keyes
Three Stars
Seven years after introducing the Walsh sisters in Watermelon, Marian Keyes in 2002 returned to the family with Rachel’s Holiday, a much stronger novel but one that still shows significant flaws. Rachel is the middle sister, a 20-something living in New York with her best friend, obsessing about finding the right boyfriend with the right look, and succumbing to lure of alcohol, cocaine and prescription medication. After she turns up with a freshly-pumped stomach in an emergency room, her family whisks her back to Ireland for rehab. Although Rachel resists her diagnosis of addict, she agrees to sign in to the rehab of choice for Irish rock stars, figuring it will be glam and spa-like experience but finds out the hard way that treatment is no holiday. In this outing, Keyes has settled into her Walsh structure — intercutting a now story focusing on the current crisis with a then story depicting the events leading up to the incident that kicks off the plot. Unfortunately, Rachel’s then story of her descent into addiction is banal and uninteresting, and I found myself skipping those chapters. Pre-stomach pumping, Rachel is shallow young woman obsessed with trivialities and watching her crash and burn again and again is boring. Far more interesting is Keyes’ depiction of the treatment regimen she undergoes and her fellow addicts and the myriad problems which led to their addiction. Keyes leavens the darker now story with her trademark humor but never pretends that Rachel’s predicament isn’t very serious. This turn to a more serious theme is what saved Keyes’ career when chick-lit itself crashed and burned.
Watermelon, by Marian Keyes
Two Stars
For spring break I wanted to dive into some light reading, so I ordered the first four books of Marian Keyes’ Walsh Family series, each of which features one of five sisters raised in semi-wacky Dublin household by a pair of loving but somewhat eccentric parents. Watermelon also happens to be Keyes’ first published novel — published in Ireland in 1995 — and it shows, including the breezy talent which made her a superstar of chick-lit, the shallowness of character common in that genre which she has successfully overcome, and a first-timer’s fuzzy repetitiveness that leads to too-long books. The story features the eldest sister, Claire, who lives in London and opens on the day she gives birth to her first child, a daughter who whose father announces in the the delivery room that he’s leaving Claire for another woman. Baby in tow, Claire heads home to Dublin, where her parents and sisters help her take care of her infant as she adjusts to life as an abandoned wife. In this novel the general Walsh family concerns are all very superficial: what’s on the telly, what everyone’s wearing, which man is Mr. Right? Obviously, Claire has some deeper concerns, but she spends most of the book obsessing over a younger man with a mystery who has entered her life. That overall superficiality and the fact that this book was published almost two decades ago are the main reasons this novel does not stand the test of time: the world has moved on, and so has Keyes’ writing. Her 21st century novels featuring multiple viewpoint characters, such as This Charming Man and The Rest of the Story, are far superior and worth reading.