14 Followers
14 Following
bookafied

Cheryl's books

Currently reading

The Collected Stories
John McGahern
Middlemarch
George Eliot
Omensetter's Luck
William H. Gass
Swann's Way
Marcel Proust, Lydia Davis
A Naked Singularity (Paper)
Sergio de la Pava
The Master and Margarita
Mikhail Bulgakov, Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky
Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews
Geoff Dyer
Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace
Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self
Claire Tomalin
Maps and Legends
Michael Chabon
Inside - Alix Ohlin "Let me out!" (response to the book "Inside").
The novel is arranged into chapters focusing on several different characters in different years; it hops back and forth between years and character viewpoints. I like that style, for it promises various insights that sometimes are dependently available only with the distance of time and other events.
Two of the characters are therapists, and the others are intricately enveloped by a therapy fog that feels like a displaced novel of the 70s. When the reader has to suspend disbelief as a coping mechanism for the implausibility of some events, then one expects to be rewarded for the effort. But instead, more stupidities ensue.
Like the characters in the novel who had trouble committing, I had difficulties committing to the characters.
Two stars, elevated to three for occasional gem flashes of prose stylings.