I’m still seeking out absorbing page-turners rather than slower meditative reads, I think because summer is drawing to an end and meanwhile we still have boxes to unpack from the move, and I just need something easy and pleasurable. I thought this would serve my needs well, because I really liked Matrix, and at first it seemed to — her prose really does reel you in — but then I found it increasingly irritating.
The novel purports to be an examination of a marriage, or more specifically, of the psychology of the two people in the marriage; and especially, the gaps in their knowledge of each other; the secrets they keep. But the gradual unfolding of lurid detail seemed sensationalistic and manipulative — it wasn’t persuasively contributing to the psychological profiles, it was just sort of unpleasant. The characters became increasing vicious, and it was unclear whether they were changing, or whether they were revealing what they had been all along. It seems odd to complain that I didn’t know whose side I was supposed to be on, but it testifies to the gradual unmooring of the novel’s ethical center. If it ceases to solicit empathy or at least understanding, does it instead invite judgment? No thank you!
But I questioned my own dislike of the book. Not so much because so many other people loved it and it was widely aclaimed, as that I wondered whether I was deluding myself about the nature of my resistance. Am I just being grumpy because I didn’t like the characters? Am I not sophisticated enough to appreciate a novel whose protagonists I don’t identify with? But then I mentioned I’d read it to a friend who rolled her eyes and sighed with exasperation and said “Ugh, it was just way too long! And the payoff wasn’t there!” and the ease with which she could just not like the book was a balm to my soul.
I think I just didn’t find the characters very believable! And therefore the ostensible inquiry into their inner world seemed largely arbitrary, and the novel…didn’t have much of a point.
(Although I just read this piece on Zadie Smith’s new novel by Andrea Long Chu where she praises the “audacious unreality” of White Teeth — which I haven’t read — and this compels me to qualify that characters don’t necessarily have to be believable, but if they aren’t, the novel must be doing something else. And I don’t think Fates and Furies is, I guess).
Kasia Reads 