This debut novel attempted to combine a novel's heft and gravity with short story nimbleness. We meet six highly educated, upper-middle class friends from Oberlin. The book starts when they reunite at Lil’s wedding, and ends when they attend her death by suicide. Since each chapter, like individual short stories, focused on one character at a time, I anticipated that the accumulation of their individual stories would result in a novel full of social realism, similar to those of 19th-Century George Eliot. I expected an ironic and socially biting look into the self-absorbed 20th-century lives of these characters.
The author's love for Brooklyn and its environs is palpable; the social mores of high-priced coffeeshops and gentrified factory lofts are brilliantly realized. But Smith is not always successful in other areas: she succumbs to melodrama, for example, in her treatment of the bride's Jewish relatives, who are not so much characters as vehicles for many contradictory impulses of feminism and New York City liberal political posturing. She squeezed too much hipness into these characters’ mundane lives, and unsuccessfully linked their personal tales with the historical force of 9/11.
With so many characters, this novel could have used a central figure. I had a difficult time distinguishing Beth from Emily, or Sadie from Lil. No one character served as tour guide as I tried to negotiate past the author’s restless shifts in point of view.The finished product turned out to be all simmer, but not a hearty Manhattan chowder. The relentlessly changing perspectives, and the awkward pacing of story development, carried more weight than plot itself.
I became frustrated with the directionless drift of their stories. I finished the novel more out of a sense of obligation. Although I’m glad for the opportunity to have read it, this is a book that I will not reread.
Message Edited by IBIS on 02-11-2009 06:10 PM
IBIS
"I am a part of everything that I have read."
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