An intriguing title from a National Book Award Nominee writer which promised to be an interesting choice for our book group. However, once again, many of us found the book hard to get into and the story quite disjointed. It's a story about time and the author attempts to echo contemporary society's rapid fire lifestyle.
Melissa's insights into this novel are quoted below :
"An interesting juxtaposition - while the characters experience a kind of jaded cynicism about the superficiality and brevity of various kinds of success, the novel is written in a highly contemporary, vigorous and energetic style. Fresh writing about 'staleness' which is both curious and confusing for the reader.
The footnote on page 180 by the character journalist Jules Jones, seems to sum up the author's possible anger at the way Western society measures people. Assessing whether you're 'in' or 'out', acceptable or not, based on foundations as fragile as celebrity and corruption.
The author, in her quirky ambitious style, seems to be mourning the loss of important values and is rapping, if you like, to use a musical term, about the degradation of contemporary measures and morals. It is an important theme for discussion and although the author is quite brilliant at representing multiple points of view in an unexpectedly wide variety of literary (and non-literary) styles (eg. Powerpoint/text messaging), jumping around chronologically like someone reporting an event on Speed - the overall experience for the reader can be quite alienating. Whilst the author presents people in various states of indifference/oblivion and suggests perhaps that we are not caring enough about what actually matters, at the some time do not seem to care about the characters in her book and we get lost in the epic interconnecting stories which feels too hard to work out along the way. If this was indeed her message, for it to have been more effective, we needed to care more."
We rated this novel 3.6 out of 10 (Only 5 of us finished the book and there was a low score of 2 and a high of 7).
Our next book is That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor by Anne Sebba.
It will be at Robyn's and on Thursday May 30th.
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