The all new 50 Books Challenge!
Title: Mrs Fletcher by Tom Perrotta
Details: Copyright 2017, Simon and Schuster Inc
Synopsis (By Way of Back Cover): "Eve Fletcher is floundering. A forty-six-year-old divorcee whose beloved, clueless only child has just left for college, Eve is slowly learning to contend with life on her own when, late one night, a mysterious text message and a new online fixation threaten to upend her quiet suburban existence. As Eve expands her horizons, her son, Brendan, becomes increasingly isolated-- and each finds themselves enmeshed in ethically fraught situations that come to a head one fateful November night.
A coming-of-age novel about the sexual awakening of a middle-aged woman, Mrs Fletcher is a moving and funny examination of sexuality, identity, and the big clarifying mistakes people can make when they're no longer sure who they are and where they belong."
Why I Wanted to Read It: Readers, I'll level with you nice folks. I've currently got a pretty limited supply when it comes to fiction. Hopefully that'll change soon, but for right now, my fictional literary ventures have been extremely curtailed and limited a lot to crime fiction, which if you're familiar at all with this challenge, is not one of my favorite genres.
When I spotted this, this Clearly Not Crime Fiction book, I pounced.
Would I read this otherwise? Well, a book about a woman's supposed "sexual awakening" written by a man is not a promising prospect. And oof, sometimes you can tell a book by your instincts. Let's get cracking.
How I Liked It: A question kept coming to me: How, HOW, how is this a bestseller?!! In 2017?!
Note: Ordinarily, I try to avoid spoilers in these reviews. However, I found this book terrible and one of the worst works of fiction I've read in years, so in order to get into why it's so bad, there's going to have to be some spoilers.
As the back cover summary states, Eve Fletcher is a divorced mother of one: a particularly entitled, smarmy jock asshole son, Brendan. The book opens with her getting ready to drop Brendan off at college, and him getting goodbye sex from his girlfriend, which his mother accidentally overhears, including her son's command to "suck it, bitch."
This sends her into horror (Is her son a misogynist?! Is it that Evil Internet Porn?!) and colors the whole ride to the college and the dropping off of her son, a job Brendan's too happy to have the student crew leader mostly push his mother out of doing.
Clingy and miserable, she gets back home and receives a lewd and disgusting text message from a number she doesn't recognize describing her as a "milf", a term she has somehow never heard before, despite the fact this is set loosely in 2014/15, given some cultural markers. Eve looks it up online, runs into porn, and subsequently develops an "internet porn addiction".
This supposedly bleeds into her life in other ways. She considers a sexual relationship with her twenty-six-year-old female colleague Amanda (whose own sexual exploits, including purposely hooking up with older men because they're "nicer", we witness) at the elder retirement community where she works (despite Eve identifying as straight).
She also takes a Gender and Society class taught by a trans woman, Dr Margo Fairchild, whom Eve befriends, and considers relationships with some of the other students, including men her age, but also one of her son's former classmates who he bullied viciously, Julian (specifically, in retaliation for Julian defending a girl one of Brendan's jock buddies was harassing at a party, Brendan and his friends kidnap Julian and tape him into a port-a-potty about a year before the book opens) who ends up in class along with her.
Meanwhile, Brendan is beginning college, and loves it at first, finding it nearly the same as his privileged high school existence, complete with a fellow jock asshole roommate, much to his mother's disappointment.
He is gradually forced out of his comfort zone in numerous ways, though. Eventually both his inability/unwillingness to work at school and his mooning over a progressive female student, Amber (she even gets him to participate in a Ferguson anti-police brutality protest and apparently he falls for her, but she doesn't take to his aggressive sexual behavior and dumps him) finds him floundering.
On top of that, the roommate he befriended avoids him now, saying he doesn't like himself when he's with Brendan, presumably the dipshit fratbro behavior. Brendan freaks out and has to resort to reaching out to a student he regularly mocked, Sanjay, the roommate of one of his former jock pals. Brendan realizes he's homesick, and Sanjay generously offers to give him a ride home.
In heading home, though, he nearly collides with his mother's sex life.
Eve, who after hosting a little party for her college friends plus Amanda, walked in on Amanda and Julian having sex in her son's old bedroom where she had put Julian for the night, as both Amanda and Julian were too drunk to go home.
The other attendees of the party, including Dr Fairchild and another student, Dummell, an Iraq vet, who starts dating Dr Fairchild, had already left.
Eve joins in (at least a bit) and everything is fine until after Amanda leaves, when Brendan comes home and finds the student he bullied sleeping in his bed. His mother makes up a story that is mostly truth (she had a class party, and Julian is only here because he had too much to drink) and her son seems to accept it.
Brendan, however, has problems of his own because he wants to drop out of school, and eventually does. His mother is busy wrestling Julian's affections (Amanda has decided to leave the senior center and pursue a new career elsewhere, so she's out of Eve's life and when Eve hears from Amanda again, Amanda has a girlfriend). She sends Julian a sexy pic after getting her hair done, but can't bring herself to go any further.
Fortunately, a guy Eve's own age, George, is already in her life! They met at the beginning of the book with her having to kick his father out of the retirement community for touching himself in front of the female residents. At the time, George's wife was dying of cancer and now this, but he's friendly enough to Eve later at his father's funeral, and eventually (towards the end of the book) they even go out on a date, hit it off, and the book ends with their wedding.
As for Brendan, after struggling with what he wanted to do and seeing the girlfriend who gave him a goodbye blow job at the beginning of the book with another guy at a party (she'd cheated on him when he was cheating on her, the audacity!) claims he's going to join the Marines, just for something to say to explain why he's out of school.
In the end, he's offered a job in plumbing with his new stepfather which is well and good until he meets his stepsister Katie and her asexual boyfriend (yes, he is ace and described in the most clumsy way possible, which we'll see) and she urges him to consider something else, her own father doesn't even like plumbing, and Brendan realizes he does want to go back to school.
As I said, the book ends with Eve's wedding to George, plumber and son of the public masturbator, a man Her Own Age, and she pauses a moment before walking down the aisle, remembering one night in bed where he called her a milf (uh, okay) and wonders at the identity of the person who sent her the lewd text message all that time ago. In the end, it's just a momentary hesitation, and she and George are married, with Brendan as George's best man.
I've talked before about separating whether a book contains bigotry versus whether the book itself is actually bigoted. And hoo boy, do we have a lot to unpack with this book.
Brendan is a racist, misogynistic homophobe, frothing with toxic masculinity and totally the product of an environment that encouraged those attributes and discouraged questioning them. But being thrown into an environment where he's forced to question them, isn't that a good thing? Yes and no. The people who force Brendan to question his privileges and bigotries (some of them, anyway) are largely Amber (the progressive college activist) who is shown to be a buzzword-spouting hypocrite and easily susceptible to how "that sort of thing just goes too far" (after Brendan botches their sexual encounter and Amber subsequently wants nothing to do with him, her overzealous roommate hangs his portrait on a campus "call out wall" for various transgressions).
As we get to know Amber, these are actual paragraphs from the book:
Amber was painfully aware of the mismatch between her politics and her desires. She was an intersectional feminist, an advocate for people with disabilities, and a wholehearted ally of the LGBT community in all its glorious diversity. As a straight, cisgender, able-bodied, neurotypical, first-world, middle-class white woman, she struggled to maintain a constant awareness of her privilege, and to avoid using it to silence or ignore the voices of those without the same unearned advantages, who had more of a right to speak on many, many subjects than she did. It went without saying that she was a passionate opponent of capitalism, patriarchy, racism, homophobia, transphobia, rape culture, bullying, and microaggression in all its forms.
But when it came to boys, for some reason, she only ever liked jocks.
It kind of sucked. She wished she were more attracted to men who shared her political convictions-- the tree-huggers, the gender nonconformists, the vegan activists, the occupiers and the boycotters, the Whiteness Studies majors, intellectual black dudes with Malcolm X eyeglasses-- but it never seemed to work out that way. She always fell for athletes-- football players, shotputters, rugby forwards, heavyweight wrestlers, even an obnoxious golfer, though he was definitely an outlier-- almost all of them hard-drinking white guys with buff, hairless chests, marinated in privilege, unable to see beyond their own dicks. And of course, they used her like a disposable object, without regret or apology, because that's what privilege is-- the license to treat other people like shit while still getting to believe that you're a good person.
What was it her father always said? The definition of crazy was doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results? Well, that was the story of Amber's love life so far, and she'd had enough. She'd vowed over the summer to stop the madness, to either start choosing her partners more wisely or, if need be, to opt for celibacy and self-respect over empty sex and the self-hating sadness that came with it. (pgs 167 and 168)
But then of course, she met Brendan, "as if the universe was testing her resolve" and ugh, he's a jock asshole, but hey, he joined her at the Michael Brown protest, so he's "definitely worth taking a chance on."
Where to even start with this mess? First, kudos, I guess, to the author for apparently reading up on all of those terms and not actually learning the meanings of any of them (also, how likely is it that a late teenager/early twenty-something progressive in the 2010s used the term "treehugger"?). Second, you can absolutely be an athlete and an activist, just ask Colin Kaepernick or Megan Rapinoe, or go earlier and ask Jackie Robinson or Muhammad Ali. So does that mean Amber is being shown to be clueless? Particularly given what her definition of "privilege" is?
Incidentally, while we're spared for the most part someone who is not a teenager from the generation in which they are writing attempting to imitate how such teenagers talk, do any teenagers past, say, 1995, let alone 2014 actually say "PC" for "politically correct", or even say "politically correct" at all?
This is before "woke" became misappropriated, of course, but seriously.
Brendan actually complains that his college is "too PC" which sounds far less like something an apolitical teenager would say in the 2010s and far more like what a middle-aged (white male) author would say. Also, Brendan runs into a Black kid at a party and they get talking about movies and the kid confesses that he liked Tropic Thunder as Brendan does but "Not very PC, though." and "I know I'm not supposed to laugh at Robert Downey Jr in blackface, but damn. Funny is funny, right?" (pg 248). Which is... troubling for a number of reasons other than the "PC" part.
Still, there's a least a dent made in Brendan's world view after seeing a film with Amber about sex trafficking, child marriage, and female genital mutilation (yes, all in one film). He also participates in a group for family members with autism, as his much younger half brother has it, and surprises himself by getting emotional.
Eve is a clueless woman who is primarily shown to see the marginalized groups that are mentioned in the novel for what they can do for her (or for her son), including this unsettling reaction when she meets Brendan's roommate:
He seemed nice enough, but Eve had to work to conceal her disappointment. She'd hoped that Brendan would get a more exotic roommate, a black kid from inner-city Boston, or a visiting student from mainland China, or maybe a gay guy with a passion for musical theater, someone who would expand her son's horizons and challenge him to move beyond his suburban comfort zone. Instead he'd gotten a long-lost brother, or at least a teammate on the Haddington High lacrosse team. (pg 14)
Okay, so that alone tells us a lot about Eve ("exotic", really?). But you see, she doesn't get any better. She learns a lot from her teacher Dr Fairchild, who she doesn't realize is a transgender woman at first and then never stops seeing as male in everything, down to her handwriting (no, seriously). Given that Eve is supposed to be a relatable character, this is especially troubling. Points for at least Eve checking herself, sort of, about the transphobia, reflecting that "she knew it was a faulty mental reflex, a kind of residual transphobia" (pg 243) although I'm not convinced given the context that the author is treating it as less a truth and more simply the fact the character picked it up after being exposed to such "PC" forms of thinking.
Eve's main other consciousness-raiser is her colleague and occasional love interest, Amanda, a feisty tattooed 26-year-old (and the book repeatedly assures us on the hugeness of her breasts; more on that later) who pushes boundaries at the senior center by pushing for more "controversial" events, like having Dr Fairchild appear and tell her transition story. But Amanda's revealed to be teaming with ageism and ableism, everything from badly misfiring when complimenting the 46-year-old Eve ("I hope I look half as good when I'm your age!") to confessing in her job interview she finds old people gross and they "freaked her out, not only because of their casual racism and homophobia and their love of Bill O'Reilly-- though that was all bad enough, but also because of their broken-down bodies, and the terrible clothes they wore, and even the way some of them smelled, which she knew was unfair, but still." (pg 267) So Amanda is another hypocrite, and her diatribe (at her job interview?!) borders on eugenics lite.
By the way, those old people she talked about? For a book where a senior center factors so heavily (it's where Eve meets two of her main love interests, after all), elders are not treated with anything regarding respect or diversity. They are gross, disgusting racists (according to Amanda, they used racial slurs "like it's still 1956 and they could say whatever they wanted", although that passage might be to indicate her own bigotry) and transphobes, bullying and harassing Dr Fairchild (one woman even demands to know what restroom she uses), and her former coach, who happens to be at the speech, repeatedly deadnames her (even when corrected) and calls her mentally ill.
Increasingly distractingly, women's bodies are the subject of much discussion and devaluing and we're given insight into the personal worth of the body and thus attractiveness of nearly every female character we meet.
Now, wait a minute, you might be saying. If it's through the lens of a misogynist teenage boy (or boys) and a woman at a crossroads assessing herself, isn't that par for the course?
Sure.
But wouldn't men's bodies be similarly put to rank? Eve is watching considerable amounts of porn, going on dates with men while considering sexual relationships with them. Brendan is an athlete feeling increasingly out of place who literally attends a college event/party where everyone is in their underwear and has to list something about their body they feel insecure about (unable to think of anything, he merely lists "calves could be bigger" although he clearly doesn't think that, judging them to be "perfectly fine"). But no, only women's bodies (especially breasts) and their attributes and shortcomings are worthy of lengthy and tedious amounts of prose, apparently. The complete absence (at least, that I can recall and I've gone back a lot for this review) of any similar ranking of male bodies in what's supposed to be the sexual exploits of a heterosexual woman (although she briefly dabbles with another woman) is incredibly strange.
The book supposedly (at least, according to its fans/positive reviewers/defenders) has Something Important to Say about the state of our world, particularly what Internet Pornography has done to us and to sex, one assumes.
I somewhat doubt this was the author's intention, but either way, it doesn't. While Eve watches a lot of pornography for a time, and is mentioned briefly (as in, one scene) feeling awkward around both her colleague and her teacher for watching both "lesbian milf" porn and trans-fetishizing milf porn, respectively, it's not exactly a major plot point so much as a brief note. The "ethically fraught situations that come to a head one fateful November night" aren't actually a big deal in the plot at all. Her son doesn't catch her having a threesome and accepts her explanation as to why Julian is sleeping over, which is not entirely a lie. So are we supposed to believe that it's porn that led her to a sexual relationship with a younger man (Julian is nineteen when the event occurs) and a younger woman?
Quite curiously, Eve's ex husband, Brendan's father, abandoned the family when Brendan was a young boy, something Brendan is mentioned repeatedly as taking very hard (and a part of his emotion at talking about his autistic half brother at the college group is realizing that he wished his father had shown him the care he shows his brother). The ex husband has a much younger wife and they have a child together and it's shown that Brendan's father has matured considerably, being involved in his youngest son's care in a way he wasn't with his older son.
For Eve's first husband, a much-younger partner was a step to his Best Life and Best Self.
For Eve, it's "ethically fraught" and something she agonizes over, even though it in no way involved cheating on a partner or abandoning her child. Yes, Amanda is her colleague and her subordinate, and it's addressed in text that Eve is crossing an ethical line, something about which she struggles. Amanda's shown as having one foot out the door of the senior center on her way to a new job, but for the time being, she's still Eve's employee. But that's their professional relationship. The age difference isn't "ethically fraught". As for Julian, he may be literally her son's age, but that age is an adult now, and he and Eve don't even meet until they're both students (and equals) in a college class.
Given that the supposed happy, self-actualized ending of the book is Eve getting married again to a man her own age, that's quite the question to the point the author might have been trying to make given that this is a novel about a woman's sexual exploration and awakening.
As for Brendan, his mother realized as a teenager he was looking at internet porn but didn't know what to do about it.
They had this strange exchange one night after Brendan is home from college.
"You need to treat women with more respect," she told him.
Brendan blinked in confusion.
"What?"
"I'm not deaf. I hear the way you talk sometimes, and I don't like it. We aren't sex objects and we're not bitches, do you understand? I never want to hear that word in this house again."
"I never--" he protested.
"Please," she told him. "Don't insult me. Not tonight. I'm not in the mood."
He stared at her for a long time, still clutching his useless controller. And then he nodded.
"Sorry," he said. "I don't mean anything by it."
"Life's not a porn movie, okay?"
"I know that." He sounded genuinely hurt that she might even think he thought it was. "Jesus."
"Good," she said. "Then please start acting like it." (pg 289)
Couple of things here. Eve is frustrated and angry because Julian is texting her and she's trying to decide what to do, and coming home to see her son playing video games means she thinks she can't go spend time with Julian, and that makes her angry.
But the problem with Brendan and those like him isn't that he watched internet porn, it's a lot of things, including that he has no proper sexual education (for one, the choking partners by pushing too forcefully during oral sex, which is what eventually does it for Amber, along with his help-needed dirty talk to his partners) and his mother didn't bother to really talk to him, not just about sex but in general. Add to that his sense of entitlement and, while it's a fool's errand to try to psychoanalyze fictional characters, you could say his father being absent and him taking it so hard probably meant his mother tried to make up for that by being lax on parenting, when it sounds like he really needed some structure, particularly in the absence of one parent. Blaming the fact he's a clueless, occasionally malicious bully (the whole kidnapping of the student and taping him in the port-a-potty has a really dark tone to it, especially when you consider they're "punishing" Julian for standing up for a girl their jock friend was harassing) somehow on "internet porn" is the kind of absurd oversimplification that's so popular with click-bait articles.
Even if Brendan's problems were only sexual (and he does clearly have sexual problems) teenage boys and men in general have been perfectly capable of treating women and girls like objects for eons before internet porn existed.
But wait! The defenders might continue to claim. Doesn't this book have a trans person in it? And there's an asexual character! Also, they talk about privilege!
All of these things are true. But again, you have to evaluate the context in which these things exist in the novel. There is indeed a trans character, and she's subjected to all kinds of transmisogyny and stereotypes, and there's the whole "sympathetic-main-character-constantly-sees-her-as-man" thing.
Early in on their friendship, Eve gives Dr Fairchild a ride to a bar after class where some of the class is meeting up for drinks and conversation.
In the bright sphere of of the classroom, Eve never had a problem accepting Dr. Fairchild as a woman. In that context-- a teacher interacting with students, deconstructing outmoded concepts of masculinity and femininity-- she seemed like an embodiment of the curriculum, her theory and practice a continuous whole. In a minivan outside a sports bar, however, the professor's gender identity seemed a little more precarious, as much wish as reality. It was partly the timbre of her voice in the darkness, and partly just the size of her body in the passenger seat, the way she filled the available space.
I can see who you were, Eve thought. One self on top of the other.
As soon as this uncharitable image occurred to her, she did her best to erase it from her mind. She wasn't the gender police. Her job-- her responsibility-- was to be kind and supportive, and not to judge the success or failure of somebody else's transformation.” (pg 142)
Eve isn't the only sympathetic character that sees her in transphobic way. Julian is out at a bar with his Gender and Society class, and a friend texts if there were "any hot chicks".
CONTENT WARNING! Transphobic and homophobic slurs will be altered in a way they aren't in the original text:
Only three ladies at the table. A d*ke, Brendan Fletcher's mom, and my professor
The t****y? Ethan texted back. Holy shit!
Julian snuck a guilty glance at Professor Fairchild, who was deep in conversation with Mrs Fletcher. Early in the semester, he had unthinkingly used the word t****y to describe his teacher, before she'd had a chance to explain how offensive it was, and now his friends wouldn't stop using it, no matter how many times Julian asked them not to. They insisted that t****y was just a harmless abbreviation, and called Julian a pussy for scolding them about it.
She's a nice person, he wrote.
Hot?
They'd been over this ground before.
Not especially
Professor Fairchild wasn't a freak or anything, far from it. She was what his mother would have called an "attractive older woman." She wore tasteful conservative suits like a lady lawyer on TV, always with a colorful scarf tied around her neck. Lots of makeup and nice perfume. A little manly around the jaw, but otherwise pretty convincing. (pg 147)
Yeah, "convincing". Seriously.
But hey, he asks his friends to stop saying slurs sometimes!
To be fair, when Dr Fairchild gives her speech to the Senior Center, Julian is in attendance and even defends her when she's attacked by the seniors, but it reads pretty strongly like a joke and he's clearly parroting terms and concepts he himself doesn't really understand.
From "convincing", by the way, he moves on to evaluating in great detail Eve's body, making some criticisms and of course, evaluating her breasts. This will give you an idea of how damn near every female character is at one point or sometimes multiple points described:
What about Fletcher's mom?
This was a harder question. Mrs Fletcher actually was kind of pretty, as much as he hated to admit it. Not in a young woman way, but pretty-for-her-age, which he didn't know exactly, beyond the obvious fact that she was old enough to be his mother. She had a nice face, maybe a little sad around the eyes, or maybe just tired. There was some gray in her hair, and she had a little belly, but she had a decent body overall. Excellent boobs, and she still looked pretty good in jeans, which was a lot more than he could say for his own mom, despite her Paleo diet and yoga addiction.
She's okay, he texted back. Except that she gave birth to a raging asshole (pg 147)
Gross. But back to Dr Fairchild for a moment.
Before the texting, Julian is thinking over how much he learned from the class, but it's about as much an understanding of these concepts as Amber has of privilege and intersectionality. So what do we make of the fact these people might be trying? That all striving for social progress is hypocrisy and buzzwords? Eve's initial, transphobic reactions to Dr Fairchild are largely written more authentically and honestly than her corrections, which mostly just come across as clumsily parroting something she's been told, rather than the fact she truly knows better now.
I wouldn't be the only one to find fault with the author's portrayal of trans women. When the book was adapted for HBO, Jen Richards, the actress who played Dr Fairchild, had to do quite a bit of work fixing up the character.
As for having an asexual character, he briefly appears (and is subject to Brendan's homophobia since he apparently looks "gay") and gives some exposition/explanation about being ace, and it's... certainly in the text. This is the first time Brendan meets his new step-sister-to-be, Katie:
Cancer was too depressing, so I asked them how long they'd been together. They traded a quick look, like maybe this was a more complicated question than it appeared to be.
"We're, uh...not really together together." Gareth said.
"Yes we are," Katie sounded a little annoyed. "We live together."
"Yeah," Gareth conceded, "But we don't have sex."
Katie nodded, maybe a little sadly.
"Gareth is an ace," she told me.
"A what?"
"Asexual," he explained. "I want to be with people. I just don't want to do anything with them." He made a face, like he was thinking about a food that grossed him out. "I never got what all the fuss was about."
"That's cool," I said. "To each his own."
We drank a shot to that, to people being whatever the fuck they wanted. I was feeling pretty loose by then, so I looked at Katie.
"So...are you like that too? Asexual?"
"Only with Gareth," she said. "If I'm attracted to a person, I tend to mold myself to whatever they are."
They were sitting together on the couch, and she dropped her head affectionately on his shoulder. After a few seconds, he reached up with his hand and started rubbing her back in a circular motion, kind of like he was cleaning a window.
"We do a lot of cuddling," Katie told me. "That's the best part anyway." (pg 303)
And from there Brendan launches into an evaluation of his future step-sister's body and attractiveness, because of course he does.
So, yeah, I wouldn't exactly call that good ace representation, although since I'm not asexual, it's not really up to me to decide. But a few factors here from listening to asexuals about ace representation in media.
Asexual people are absolutely "together" with other people! They have partners! They can have marriages! And hey, whether you're ace or allo, even if you aren't actively having sex with someone else, you can be together in a relationship with them! Literally all "asexual" means is that you are not sexually attracted to other people! You can be romantically attracted to other people! There are genuinely happy asexual couples that want the same thing! I've met them! And yes, it does matter since if you're going to this much trouble to awkwardly shoehorn in an asexual character, at the least you could do some better research. A couple that is suggested as clearly wanting different things (she's disappointed by the fact he doesn't want sex, he performs physical affection like a chore) is not exactly a happy one.
And for the talk about "privilege", we've seen that it's pretty empty. Frankly, at best it seems in this book like social enlightenment is a funny parroting of buzzwords and concepts you don't really understand, and at worst, out and out hypocrisy to be mocked for its clear insincerity and your "natural" bigotry is the real truth.
For "diversity", trans and asexual people have always existed. It's only been more recently that anti-discrimination and increased representation have made them more visible, and it's something the author treats about the same as What You'd Expect to See in the 2010s, like social media posts, lewd anonymous texts, and Ferguson protests. Just a part of the cultural landscape that suddenly shot up, right?
Also, again, this book was published in 2017. There's been several trans and asexual characters in media, on major TV shows that have entered the public lexicon, and considerable press. Had this book been written in, say, the 1990s (and the author had no access to the internet), I'd be a bit more lenient, maybe. But it wasn't, so I'm not.
But okay, all of that aside, you may ask. How is this as just a story with characters? How is this as storytelling for entertainment value?
Well, there aren't a great deal of likeable characters. Possibly the most likable major player is Dr Fairchild, but even she thinks nothing of becoming romantically involved with one of her students. When Eve questions the ethics of such a thing, Dr Fairchild literally says "Who cares" and "Do you have any idea what they pay me?" and "we're all adults!" Which to be fair, makes her human with flaws (although it would be nice if she had at least hesitated or had been shown with some reservations). But given that we have little else to go on since we're too busy seeing her the way others see her, there's not much more to her that we see, even though she mentions an eight-year-old daughter.
For some reason, Eve's story is told in the third person and Brendan's in the first, which feels unnecessarily jarring.
The ending (with the marriage) feels tacked on and we see a miniature version of the progression of Eve and George's relationship and eventual marriage and it's really not enough to feel earned. As for Brendan nearly catching his mother in a threesome being a "fateful night", it isn't. It isn't even really a turning point, given that Eve still considers a relationship with both Amanda (they later try a tipsy kiss in her office and both of them admit they're not feeling it) and with Julian (even seriously considering having sex at his parents' place). The plot is kind of a mishmash and it thinks it's not.
The book's defenders also claim it's hilarious. It isn't, at least not intentionally. What are presumably intended to be jokes are mostly either tedious or insufferable. Possibly the one time I didn't either wince or roll my eyes was during an Amanda section where an author popular with the senior center has suddenly died. He's famous for writing mysteries but having the perpetrator always be a person of color. When Amanda has asked him about this in the past, he reacted predictably, defensively calling her the racist for noticing race. When his wife calls the center to let them know her husband won't be making the engagement because of his death, she laments that he never finished his last book so they'll never solve the mystery. Amanda retorts internally that you should just look for the character of color, while out loud expressing her sympathies to the author's widow.
But given how Amanda is usually framed (as a hypocrite), it's not quite the laugh it would be.
Perhaps the only even slightly redeeming thing about this book (aside from, of course, maybe cautionary example) is the fact it's readable, unlike some others this year. But that's a low, low bar and while it may be readable, you won't actually enjoy what you're reading.
I wondered how on earth this was a bestseller, let alone a bestseller with an HBO adaptation.
Although his name was unfamiliar to me, the author's other work is not, although I haven't read them. Apparently Election, Little Children, and The Leftovers were all very popular, and had screen adaptations. With that in mind, it makes sense that people would expect this to be more of the same. The book has an almost nostalgic 1990s feel to it that feels alien today. In this century, we don't need to be told the secrets lurking in the suburbs. We aren't shocked and dismayed at the dark undercurrents of society (if we ever actually were, of course). This century has seen constant war, historic recession, the end of the modern Era of Prosperity (1950-2000), unprecedented disaster from numerous factors, and the rise of fascism, and that's just counting up until this book's publication date, not the four years after. There's no happy suburban facade anymore, it crumbled years ago and underneath was climate change and late stage capitalism. This book is the literary equivalent of a network sitcom with a laugh track; a curious throwback to a bygone era that most people can still remember.
So we've got an at best sub-par book by a famous, bestselling author that if you're willing to be persuaded and not really think critically, has Big Things to say about Our Society, especially when it comes to the internet, and it reads like a '90s relic. If you again do not think critically and don't actually read the book, you could say it has diverse characters and there's talk about questioning your privilege and assumptions and stuff. In fact, maybe you don't actually read the book but buy it with the promise that it's really hilarious and makes great points about The Times We're Living In, and you're going to watch the HBO adaptation, probably, because you really liked The Leftovers.
On second thought, of course this was a bestseller.
Notable: So the book takes place in roughly 2014/2015. At a gathering at Eve's house with Julian, Amanda, Eve, Dr Fairchild, and her love interest and student, Dummell, the gang has drinks and toasts to a number of things.
It was a conveniently small group-- maybe a little too small-- and they all seemed to be vibrating on the same wavelength, cracking jokes and laughing a little too loudly, toasting Margo for her excellent scarf collection, Dumell for his service to his country, Amanda for the alcoholic beverages, and Julian simply for showing up, representing the millennials. (pg 212)
Okay, Amanda is twenty-six and Julian is 19, and this is approximately 2015. Amanda is also definitely a Millennial. I can't tell if this is a joke about how there's nothing else to Julian, though, that even his generation Amanda is also representing. I'm guessing (particularly given, you know, the entire rest of the novel) it's just someone else yet again misusing the term Millennial.
Final Grade: D-
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