clairebau's reviews
46 reviews

writing style is convoluted and unenjoyable

Oh, wow. I knew I'd like this book because it's so conceptually fascinating, but I liked it more than I thought I would, despite it being in first person. 

I'll start with my issues: the pacing was off. The ending felt rushed. I was disappointed by this.

This book reminded me why I love reading women written by women. The characters are rich and well-defined yet described simplistically in a quick, punchy writing style that I just adore. I'm not generally into mysteries, but I had a ton of fun piecing together details to try to solve the plot of this horror/thriller combo. Gorgeously, gorgeously done. Exposition was provided in a perfect steady drip that captivated me. The characters are awesome. The gore is written so effectively; the horror is intrinsic, and never did I have to be told how scared or unnerved to feel. God, I love weird books. As someone who struggles with her relationship to beauty as a "hobbyist" and willing participant but still identifies as a more radical-leaning feminist, this was the book for me. Everyone quotes this, but I'll drop it here too:

"Beauty has always been one of the ways women have been able to access power, and I can't fault any of them for wanting more of it."

Turns out I'm not into surrealism!

I picked this up because everyone has been talking about it forever. I don't know why I did. I hate first person, and the writing style is too simplistic for my taste :p

I thoroughly enjoyed every page of this book. Vara has a talent for characterization through description of other characters through the eyes of the narrator; in a description of a few sentences (or fewer. usually fewer) one gets an immediate, visceral sense of a new character and also how their description defines the narrating character. This is not just appreciated but also necessary in a story that includes so many unique players, and it was done so well. The family-epic-style storytelling reminded me a bit of Eugenides's Middlesex; aptly a Pulitzer-winning novel while Rao was sadly only nominated.

Some have criticized the ending for feeling too rushed, or that the threads connecting each storyline were not strong enough to leave the reader satisfied. I disagree; I found the connections between each story to be rewarding and surprising. I do wish the end of Athena's story was fleshed out as much as the beginning was. Vara mentioned in her acknowledgements that this novel was a twelve year long project; perhaps she was simply sick of writing it, and for that I cannot blame her.

My favorite part of this novel is that it explores every aspect of the political. A theme I did not expect to come through so strongly and repetitively was that of the man's entitlement to the woman: her body, her children, her intellect. These parts were harrowing and deeply emotional, and as cathartic as one would expect. 

Great stuff. I can see myself rereading in the future. 

It should come as no surprise that Eisenberg writes well (and I do mean that. Not just passably, but well); a career spent poring over scripts to critically analyze word choice will give you a good eye for what works and what doesn't.

It's hard to say whether it was a wise decision to open with titular story Bream Gives Me Hiccups. I went in skeptically; attempts at adults-writing-from-a-child's-perspective-for-an-adult-audience are often made and rarely something I enjoy, but he nailed the earnest naivety of a nine-year-old making sense of the world and, more aptly, his family. Wannabe good writers will spoon-feed you exposition with off-putting vigor. Eisenberg hides it in Easter eggs you'll delight in plucking from the fertile grass of the lawn he delicately tends. This section was a delight. I would have loved a novel-length adaptation of these rich concepts and characters, but instead I was forced to immediately afterward trudge through his other - worse - stories.

As with any collection of unrelated stories, there will be hits (Bream Gives Me Hiccups, A Guy on Acid Tries to Pick up a Woman at a Bar) and misses (My Nephew has some Questions, A Post-Gender-Normative Man Tries to Pick Up a Woman at a Bar). This book feels a bit like an episode of SNL in that way and others, namely that most of the stories in the latter-half of the book feel like little more than extensions of a good idea for a bit. You read the title and you're like, okay, sure, got it, and you read the story to find it's exactly what you expected (A Bully Does his Research, particularly). That doesn't necessarily make them any less enjoyable, but it certainly fails to make them feel special, different, or interesting. It's clear that Eisenberg tries his very best to say something with this book, whether it be about new-age feminism or Marxism or society at large, but that messaging fell flat next to his frankly brilliant characterization of the mundane players in the more "vapid" stories (the titular and My Roommate Stole my Ramen), which he handled with obvious skill and care.

Tl;dr: I demand a fictional novel from Eisenberg!