Title: The Night the Lights Went Out by Karen White
Details: Copyright 2017, Penguin Random House
Synopsis (By Way of Back Cover): "From the New York Times bestselling author of the Tradd Street series comes a stunning novel about a young single mother who discovers that the nature of friendship is never what it seems....
Recently divorced, Merilee Talbot Dunlap moves with her two children to the Atlanta suburb of Sweet Apple, Georgia. When an anonymous local blog starts dishing about her failed marriage, Merilee finds some measure of peace in town matriarch Sugar Prescott.
Sugar’s stories give Merilee a different perspective on the town and its wealthy school moms in their tennis whites and shiny SUVs, and even on her new friendship with glamorous young mother Heather Blackford.
In a town like Sweet Apple, where sins and secrets are as likely to be found behind the walls of gated mansions as in the dark woods surrounding Merilee’s house, appearance is everything. But just how dangerous that deception can be will shock all three women...."
Why I Wanted to Read It: For a large swath of this pandemic and even still, some of my literary options, particularly for fiction, (say it with me!) are somewhat limited. I was delighted to find a work of fiction that wasn't (or so I thought!) crime fiction, although that doesn't always exactly work out too well.
How I Liked It: Sometimes I wish stories were allowed to be what they are.
If you've ever watched your favorite book (or even a favorite book) get a screen adaptation of any kind, you'll know exactly what I mean. What can work between an author (or authors), editor, agent, and publisher does not always maintain when translated into a different form, particularly when that form has a whole lot more people and is far likelier to have several focus groups straining it for "likeability".
It's how a brutal, lush coming-of-age story with no easy answers about identity can be watered down into an insipid, trite mother-and-daughter Lifetime Lite flick when it makes it to screen, and how a plotless memoir of mental illness and consideration into who or what is labelled flawed is made into a virtually unrecognizable melodrama with stock characters and plenty of ham-fisted lesson-learning.
But those are someone adapting the original story to a different medium. What do you do when a story is pointing in all ways in one direction and yet the author is convinced it isn't? We'll get there.
First, meet our dual main characters! Merilee Talbot Dunlap, fresh from being dumped by her husband of eleven years for her daughter's third grade teacher, Merilee is moving with her children, ten-year-old perpetual worrywart Lily, and 8-year-old adventurer Colin to Sweet Apple, Georgia (Sweet Apple is intended to be a fictional northern suburb of Atlanta) for a fresh start. Nonagenarian matriarch, the formidable (and forbidding) Sugar Prescott is renting out her family home, furnished (some of the furnishings dating back decades), and will be her landlady. The story alternates between the mysterious town gossip blog ("The Playing Fields Blog" which is signed rather ominously by "Your Neighbor") that is that serves as a sort of narrator, to Sugar and Merilee (primarily Merilee) in the present, to various flashbacks to Sugar's life and family (her brothers, the Black family that was close to Sugar's, and a nasty, trouble-making neighbor villain who literally commits various violent crimes) starting in the 1930s.
Merilee struggles to find her footing with the fancy new school for her children for which her inlaws are footing the bill until she's taken under the wing of the rich, glamorous head of the school moms, a mysterious woman with an eerie liking to Merilee and a handsome, mega-rich, secretly miserable husband with whom Merilee strikes up a friendship. Meanwhile, the mysterious blog keeps churning out more info, especially about Merilee and her delicate situation with her ex! WHO IS THIS AND WHY ARE THEY DOING THIS! Adding to the action, Sugar's got a super hunky young man around (grandson of her best friend Willa Faye) who is just Merilee's age and serves as a handyman to the property.
In the past, we see Sugar face horror and trauma through the years with her family, generally connected around the aforementioned nasty, trouble-making neighbor villain. We feel it's building to something, but we don't know what.
Things come to a head with a death that was an accident (OR WAS IT MURDER!) on top of several incidents that don't look great for her (due to a series of misunderstandings). Merilee's casting out (of sorts) by the town or at least the school, and various events in her past come back up, including a lingering bullying incident (with Merilee being the bully) that reaches its conclusion, along with the reveal of the author of the blog, and why we've been seeing flashbacks to Sugar's life. Well, sort of.
Got all that? This book is blurbed on the front cover (in a font that carefully suggests that it's the New York Times being quoted, rather than New York Times best selling author Lauren Willig) as being
"If Big Little Lies met To Kill a Mockingbird."
That honestly sounds like a horrible idea, but it was hard not to take that into my expectations of this book. I've read Big Little Lies and To Kill a Mockingbird, and while both are flawed, both were worthwhile reads on varying levels, separately. I've actually read most of Lianne Moriarty's books and while they are usually quite entertaining reading, a frequent reader of hers can easily make out a Lianne Moriarty bingo card fairly quickly (overbearing/unbearable sister/sister-in-law! A Social/Topical Issue™! A lonely older character! Primary school politics!). One can with any author if you read enough of their work of course, but with Moriarty it seems especially easy, not that that makes her work any less enjoyable.
Big Little Lies, currently the best known of Moriarty's work thanks to its successful HBO adaptation, did humorously (and ruthlessly) dissect how gossip and ostracism, particularly against the backdrop of a school for young children and their sometimes-overbearing parents, can have brutal effects and blind people to what's really happening. For what's mostly a witty (if not lighthearted) book, it handles most of its tougher issues surprisingly gracefully.
To Kill a Mockingbird has a difficult history and recent reconsiderations of its politics and tropes that cause more harm than good are long overdue. But it's still a compelling, immersive story with characters that stick with you.
Dropping either universe into the other sounds about as appealing as brushing your teeth while drinking orange juice. But fortunately, the review is superficial. This book has only a passing resemblance to Big Little Lies (elementary school politics, rumors and social-shunning) and to Mockingbird (a rural Southern childhood in the 1930s, also anti-Black racism and violence because see previous).
In fact "superficial" might be a good term in general for this book. I've read quite a few books set in the American South and written by Southerners, including books and writing plain about being Southern. This book comes across as so self-consciously "Southern" I was surprised the author actually is. While, say, Rick Bragg might be able to translate the South for outsiders in a way that comes across as both descriptive and relatable, this author... can't quite. Still, there's some gritty compelling quality in Sugar's flashbacks because we get the feeling they're leading somewhere. They're a better read than the story in the present, frankly.
That's in part because the story in the present is fairly cookie-cutter.
We're assured of the love interest's muscles and sexiness!
He chuckled, the sound low and rumbly in his chest, the chest that was currently covered by a close fitting T-shirt that showed off a rather impressive outline of muscles. She looked away. (pg 155)
"Thanks," he said, flashing a smile that wouldn't look out of place on a magazine cover. (pg 251)
Perfect Mom at the children's school befriends Merilee!
Heather continued. "I like you a lot. I think we have so much in common, and I just know we will be great friends. Which is why I have chosen you as my 'project'." (pg 160)
Merilee is reluctant to take a chance on Love Interest!
"It's just that I don't want you getting any ideas of, well, you know. You-and-me-as-a-couple kind of thing. I'm sure you don't consider me that way, and to be honest, I'm still getting over my husband and our nasty divorce and have absolutely no interest in dating anyone right now. Maybe ever." (pgs 179 and 180)
He can't get close to you with all that exposition in the way, Merilee!
Speaking of excruciating dialog, this is from one of perfect mom Heather's Pilates trainers meeting Merilee:
"I love your lipstick," the shorter one said. "It really brightens up your face. I always tell my clients that on days when they don't feel like exercising to put on a pretty shade of lipstick, and it's an instant pick-me-up." (pg 233)
This is supposed to be 2016 and that line is played utterly straight, as in no character remarks that that's a hilarious thing to say. Which kind of brings me to my main point.
Heather is instructing her new friend Merilee on something Merilee can do for her. Merilee has made quite a friend of Heather's very wealthy husband Daniel:
"Well, as luck would have it, my wedding anniversary is on the night of the gala. And since you work at the most fabulous jeweler in Atlanta, maybe you could help Daniel choose something wonderful for me. He and I don't have the same... taste in jewelry. He thinks a small knickknack is sufficient to show his love, but I disagree." She threw her head back and laughed, revealing a diamond pendant necklace that had to be at least four carats. "I know you will be able to direct him to something more my taste. Something big and shiny." (pg 161)
Heather laughs but isn't really portrayed as joking around about her intentions and the scene is played seriously.
So combined with the Pilates instructor's advice about lipstick, isn't this... kitsch?
Without giving anything away, the climax of action has a very kitsch-friendly "twist" (or ""twist"" I guess?) about a long-held grudge and the most over-the-top calculated revenge, which has the villain yet again revealing their entire motivation and secrets before the main character (there... has GOT to be a better way to have the mystery be unveiled than this hilarious, unwieldy, overused trope, I beg of you), as usual seemingly completely unaware that this is buying the main character precious, precious escape time.
But given the book's grittier, earthier sections involving Sugar, most of which are more plausible than anything in the modern section, this clearly isn't intended to be kitsch. It's trying to be a far more serious, more meaningful book than the modern section would suggest.
I've literally argued this year that a book doesn't need to be good to be good. In Still Missing, there were a few moments that bordered on ridiculous, but the heart of the book was there in a way it isn't here. The culmination of the Sugar flashbacks is a bit weaker than it should be and the tie to the modern storyline is tenuous, at best.
Also, where Still Missing boasted some genuine twists and turns and surprises, I'll assure you that this book sadly does not. I honestly thought seeing the mysteries coming so far ahead was some sort of misdirect in and of itself, somehow, and while there's nothing wrong with planting and pay off, even if it's a really obvious planting, the motivations are kind of ridiculous and you don't suspect because you might be wanting to give the book more credit.
Speaking of ridiculous, I've mentioned before in these reviews that I generally don't care for crime fiction since it's frequently too unrealistic. Here, realism isn't even attempted in the modern storyline (although oddly it is in Sugar's flashbacks, another aspect marking the disconnect between the two stories). The unrealism is so over the top it's almost not worth remarking on as consideration, since you don't generally look for realism in kitsch.
One thing this book has in common with Still Missing though, is what I'm going to call Cartoon Cruelty. Without spoilers, Merilee has faced tragedy in her past through no real fault of her own. But even before that happened, it's shown she had a strained relationship with her mother, which is often absurd. And of course strained family relationships are often ridiculous, petty, and maybe even hilarious in real life. But much like with people showing casual, over-the-top cruelty to trauma victims, it's hard to get right in fiction and too often comes across as just a cheap ploy to force sympathy for the main character. And in a book that risks unintentional kitsch to begin with, the last thing we need is Cartoon Cruelty.
Merilee looked away. She'd always hated the movie [Gone With the Wind], mostly because her mother had been nicknamed Scarlett when she was younger. So much more meaningful than [Merilee's nickname among her friends] "Tallie," she'd always been happy to point out to Merilee. (pg 286)
"Mama? I'm in trouble again. Somebody died, and I was there, and the police are asking questions." She was crying now, tears of fear and desperation, carrying with them the last shred of hope that her parents would realize after all this time that she was still their daughter.
"No, Merilee. Not again. I will not have you do this to me again. We had to move to another town last time because of you. I will not have you shame us again. Please don't call back until you've sorted all this out on your own. We cannot help you."
The phone flicked and there was nothing to listen to but air. (pg 315)
Damn, Merilee's mom. Apparently you've been shamed beyond most contraction!
My word, Merilee, do you have to get your slovenly uncivilized traumatic events all over creation? SHAME!
The thing is, this book, had it leaned into the kitsch, would've been great. A few tweaks to the Sugar section and that could've worked with it, too. In fact, in the hands of the right director, the screen adaptation for this could be a camp classic.
But the catch is, the author wasn't going for that, and instead tries to stitch all these disparate threads together with a "strong women survive things!" banner and it's not only weak, it's not terribly interesting. If the author wanted to write a book about strong women surviving through unthinkable times and calling on reserves of strength they didn't know they had (and this being a bond between two unlikely friends) that would've been one thing. But what the author wrote was an over-the-top, disjointed mess with great potential for kitsch trying to be a book about strong women surviving through unthinkable times and calling on reserves of strength they didn't know they had, and it's really not, for all the reasons I pointed out.
Sometimes I wish books were allowed to be what they are.
Notable: This book is set in the then-present of 2016 and Sugar is 94-years-old. While this is slightly more explainable since it takes place in the present (and thus Sugar would of course witness modern slang and word and term usage), I noticed a Lilac Girls-esque tendency (as in too-modern phrases spoken by someone who wouldn't say that) to try to prompt modern phrases/slang out of a member of the Greatest Generation in the most forced and unnatural way. I'm not saying that past some nebulous age you're not allowed to use phrases from the past, say, fifteen years or so, but I'm saying it can be written in a way (along with an explanation of how someone that age knows of that which is basically lampshading that you as an author know it's a stretch for this character to talk like that) that absolutely comes across as lazy as it does here.
Merilee discusses her school girl bullying past with Sugar:
"So you became a 'mean girl'?"
Merilee frowned. "How did you ever hear that term?"
"They were playing that movie with that young actress who's since lost her mind-- Lindsay somebody-- at the little movie theater at the place where Willa Faye lives, so we watched it. Showed me how much things have changed since I was a girl. And how little." (pg 241)
Really? There would be literally no other movies playing to see? And you wouldn't feel drawn to a romantic comedy or historical epic instead, despite just about everything in the way your character is written that suggests you would prefer that?
"You and I and your real friends know that you did nothing wrong. Just like everybody knows that I have no business driving a little car. So pull up your big-girl panties and let's go to the store." (pg 269)
I'm not saying it's impossible that she would say "big-girl panties" but probably far more likely she'd say "so pull up your britches."
I suppose I could have worn my mama's dress [to my wedding], but nobody mentioned it. Maybe because they wanted to think I should start my own marriage with better karma. Not that anybody would have called it that-- I'm sure there's a Christian word for it-- but we were all thinking the same thing (pg 247)
Okay, that last one takes place in a flashback to 1943. She could have easily substituted "luck" for "karma" and her meaning would've still gotten through and not needed that clumsy explanation.
On seeing Daniel(Heather's rich but friendly husband)'s elaborate den for the first time thanks to her turning up at the wrong meeting space, he consoles Merilee who is quite ashamed of her social faux pas:
"Please. Don't be embarrassed. I don't mind the company. The girls are out to dinner with their grandparents, so it's just me and my favorite non-PC old sitcoms that nobody else will watch with me."
She felt a smile tugging at her lips. "If it's any consolation, I love Hogan's Heroes. And if non-PC is your cup of tea, then I suspect F Troop and I Dream of Jeannie are also favorites. I grew up watching reruns on TV." (pg 133)
Can we, as a people, all rise up and agree to never use "PC", referring to "political correctness" ever again? LET IT DIE. Don't replace it with racist misappropriation of words like "woke", either. Number one it's a wholly reactionary term and two it's completely unnecessary, especially in a situation like this. You could replace "outdated" and still get the same effect. Also, shows from decades past are generally going to reflect those decades and the standards of the time. It's like an entertaining history lesson. Instead of "justifying" why you're "allowed" to like something, see it that way. Stop trying to make "non-PC" into a whole personality when you just sound like an overly defensive bigot (which, actually, is who makes "non-PC" into a whole personality).
"Why don't you children go take your snack into the living room and watch a video?"
"What's a video?" Colin asked.
They all turned to Wade. "She means a DVD. I'm sure you've got something to watch. Sugar and I need to talk." (pg 317)
This is a great example of trying and not succeeding to write for a younger generation. Colin is eight years old in 2016. He would've grown up with YouTube. What is the main feature on YouTube? Videos. There are far better ways to show the generation divide than that. Also, isn't it more likely that Sugar would've said "watch a movie?"
A group of women- presumably mothers since it was right after school drop-off-- sitting next to me in the local coffee shop last week were talking about millennials and how the world will certainly end when they're old enough to take over and run things. One woman joked that the easiest way to confuse a millennial was to show them a first-place trophy. (pg 207)
This is from the anonymous blog whose author is revealed by the end of the book. The author of the blog, by the way, blames parents for why "millennials" are they way they are, "Because a sense of entitlement and a lack of responsibility dont't [sic] just happen by accident. They are taught. Just something to think about."
This brings me to (wait for it!) yet another one of my pet peeves. YOUR NOSTALGIA GOGGLES AND YOUNG/OLD PEOPLE SUCK MANTRAS ARE NOT GENERATIONAL DISCOURSE. People complaining about the younger generation is absolutely nothing new and dates back thousands of years, at least.
So why not say "young people" or even "the younger generation" instead of "Millennials" which refers to a specific group? (Loosely, those born between 1980-2000) Most of which, incidentally, would've been adults during the time this book is set (2016)? And the old anti-Millennial chestnut of "everybody gets a trophy" overlooks the fact that policy was not instituted for the Millennial children to congratulate their "achievement", it was for their (primarily Boomer) parents to congratulate them on their parenting of a future superstar. The trophy nonsense especially rankles because it's trying harder to be generational discourse and failing that much harder.
Still, a cute reminder (from only four years ago, which should tell you the validity of this "discourse") of when the scary term for "young people" was "Millennial" and not "Gen Z". Words have meanings, people. Stop throwing them around.
Yes, this is a character in the book speaking. But it's a character portrayed as a voice of reason, thus I must address it (MUST).
Final Grade: C
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