Roy Lichtenstein, Kiss V, 1964
(June 4) It killed me when I got to the end of this book and saw the lengthy and detailed acknowledgements thanking people who had read multiple drafts and offered advice on the realism of certain settings and actions, and who had “all made the book so much better”.... could not one of them have caught “I turned on the sink and started washing the dishes” on p. 51? (So like the “empty glass of champagne” in The Night Circus.)And for all this help and advice, the book is still kind of unrealistic and at the same time banal in its fantasy-spinning.
Argh, I always have a lot to say about books that are C, C+.
I can’t remember where I got the recommendation, but it must have been from someone’s Instagram account. I do remember commenters discussing a twist and how the whole set-up was so emotional and wrenching. In fact, it was the desire to find out what “the twist” was that kept me reading after I saw how unbelievable it was going to be, how much it was pandering to lovers of romantic baloney.
Jill Santopolo admits in the afterword that she started the book based on the ending of a real-life love affair she never thought would end. That makes sense, because the early part of the book, when Lucy is falling in love with Gabe and then mourning him, seems much more realistic. There are clumsy characters and cliché moments that jar but the loving and mourning seem true to life.
Gabe, though, is a little too perfect... and so reluctant is the author to tarnish his halo that even his decision to go off on a job that Lucy “can’t” follow him on (and this, too, tortures reality -- why “can’t follow”? That one job in New York is the only fulfilling work she can do?) is softened by his eventual invitation to come along. The bad thing, apparently, is “only” that he did not think to ask her along right from the start ...all along he thought he would come back to her, his one true love (despite several serious relationships over the years, including an engagement, which she keeps hearing about secondhand).
I kept hoping the twist would be that they were miscommunicating and misinterpreting each other's actions in the way Romeo and Juliet did, but, no, the twist is something else.
It all just clanged and clanked. I don’t require 100 Years of Solitude from every novel -- but it needs to be more clever than this.
When I started it I was sort of charmed by the coincidence that it was set to a September 11 timeline -- the day itself, the Gulf War, the establishment of memorials, the killing of Bin Laden, etc., etc. -- and I had just come back from my first visit to New York where I'd seen the play Come From Away, which really took me back to 9/11 very vividly. So resonant.
But then:
The brother who expresses everything through Pinterest-level science jokes is very lame.
The scene when the first-person female narrator describes her physical looks in a way that makes sure we know she is drop-dead gorgeous and yet not an egomaniac at all is lame. Since there is no believable way to do this, such passages are always yucky and grade C.
So it had these and many more such moments... yet there is great love out there for it! There are more than 17,000 5-star reviews of this book on Goodreads!
