What I’m Reading: Wolitzer

Aug 202016
 

The Interestings

By Meg Wolitzer

Two Stars

Read September 2014

After the death of her father, a middle-class kid from Long Island wins a scholarship to an arts camp for teens in the Berkshires and falls in with a group of mostly wealthy Manhattanites who dub themselves “The Interestings.” Except they aren’t very interesting, really, especially after they reach adulthood and the story settles in as one long whine by Jules, the Long Islander, whose life is dominated by her corrosive envy of her best girl friend, Ash, who marries the homely genius Jules rejected and winds up a globetrotting celebrity when his primetime cartoon turns out to be an endless cash machine. Meg Wolitzer’s story begins in 1974 and feels like a throwback to the novels popular at that time — long multi-character rags-to-riches sagas that spanned decades and offered behind-the-scenes details of privileged lives. Wolitzer hits many of the touchstones of the eras she covers, everything from LSD and Moonies to 9/11 and Asian sweatshops, but some of her subsidiary characters are more of a distraction than anything else. Despite the large cast, in the end this is Jules’ book, and as the years pass, my initial sympathy for her turned into deep dislike. Envy is an ugly emotion, and Jules spends a quarter century embracing it rather than trying to get over it, making herself, her long-suffering husband and this reader miserable.

What I’m Reading: Tartt

Aug 202016
 

The Goldfinch

By Donna Tartt

One Star

Read June 2014

In the immediate aftermath of a devastating terrorist bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a 13-year-old boy who’s shaken but not injured by the blast slips a small 17th century masterpiece into his backpack and makes his way out of the museum and back to his apartment without being intercepted by any of the rescue workers at the bombsite. After that scarcely believable beginning, Donna Tartt’s novel goes all in with tabloid tawdriness that many reviewers likened to the work of Charles Dickens, a comparison that seems more apt in terms of length than in terms of language. In the two decades that follow, keeping the secret of the stolen painting becomes a continuing problem for the boy, Theo Decker, as he moves through a series of new homes, including a brief stay at the elegant apartment of the family of a school friend who take him in immediately after the bombing, a lengthy stay at the Las Vegas rental home he shares with his estranged father and the father’s girlfriend, and a final home with an eccentric Manhattan antique dealer whose partner was also killed in the Met bombing. For me, the tedium of this novel arose in Las Vegas, where Theo’s mostly left to his devices as is his new friend, Boris, whose expat Russian father leaves him on his own for weeks at a time. Tartt spends endless pages detailing the drug and alcohol exploits of the adolescent boys, which Dickens might have made interesting but she does not. Unfortunately, much of the rest of the novel is given over to the logistics of Theo’s drug addiction but not in any revelatory way. The reader hears about Theo wanting drugs, needing drugs, seeking drugs, finding drugs, and taking drugs, but it’s all very generic stuff – Wow! What a rush! — with less depth than an elementary school DARE assembly. Meanwhile, the story continues in tabloid — oops! — Dickensian fashion: a two-timing fiance, a Russian mobster, a fraud of bogus antiques, a shootout. Tartt’s characters don’t engage the heart or the mind, her plot offers no special insight into the way we live now, and her language is pedestrian. At 775 pages, this novel is long enough for Dickens, but that’s where the similarity ends.

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