This book hooked me so hard that I found myself picking it up at every free moment — like, I’d be in the kitchen making dinner and would jump in for a page or two while the water was coming to a boil. It was a combination of the incredible sense of closeness with the characters and the skillfully crafted sense of suspense, even dread, watching them makes things worse and worse for themselves. And it worked, because I was somehow confident that nothing really horrific was going to happen, but even so, maybe 2/3 of the way through the book it did start to feel like a bit too much, like the balance was tipping to be more unpleasant than was really warranted. But even then, some of the formal innovations — shifts in voice, especially, and some genre play — kept me firmly stuck in the book, and I tore through it in a few long sessions. But when I came up for air afterwards — and after a long book club conversation, and some messages back and forth with a friend — I found myself with decidedly mixed feelings. It’s an ambitious and interesting book, and there are a lot of things to admire in it, but I’m not sure that I’d put it in the category of truly great, or among the best books of the year, etc. But that’s also a problem of the expectations I brought to it, and no fault of its own.
If you’ve read the book already and want the taste of some of those conversations, carry on, but if not, stop here because there will be spoilers, and this is a book where I think it really matters, more than usual, that you not know too much beforehand. But it’s impossible to discuss this book without getting into the ending. Interestingly enough, in my bookclub, it was an even split because people who liked the book and hated the ending, and people who didn’t much like the book but enjoyed the ending, and I think that bifurcation is telling in itself.
What I like abut cliffhanger endings is that they force you to think about what kind of ending would actually satisfy you, and what kind of ending you expected, and what the various possibilities for what could have happened are. It makes you do the work, which is precisely why it’s also very annoying, and perhaps even more so because in the process, you shed the fictional illusion, ie, you are forced to confront the fact that nothing actually did happen because these people aren’t real in the first place (or, I guess, if you don’t shed it you’re still left with the annoying problem that you’ll never actually know what happened). I still can’t decide whether I liked the ending of this one or not, but I thought it was especially interesting that the book does also give you some stronger hints about some parts of the the finale. I think it’s pretty clear that Big Mike and Ryszard have finished each other off, which neatly — perhaps too neatly! — resolves all kinds of other problems in the story. And therefore it clears a path for the book to either have a happy ending, or for a real twist of tragic irony. And I find that the explicit formal experimentation, particularly the shift to — not exactly theatrical dialogue, but bits of narration parceled out among characters — sort of signals, to me, that we are meant to read it in dramatic terms, as tragedy in the classical sense. But who knows. It definitely frustrated me though.
A final thought, not about the ending but revealing more than I’d want to if someone hadn’t read the book, is that Murray did an absolutely phenomenal job depicting the inner lives of women and the complexities of their various relationships, especially friendships. The scene I most loved, like I actually made some kind of delighted sound out loud because it was so perfect, was the moment when Ryszard is trying to get Cassie and Elaine to make out with each other, and they kiss, and Cassie is sort of bowled over by how soft and lovely her best friend’s lips are, and how nice it is to kiss her, and then they look into each other’s eyes and start cracking up, feeding off of this silly inside joke they have, and are completely carried away with giggling. It’s such a brilliant description of that hair’s breadth boundary between various forms of love and attachment — close friends, lovers, partners — that can feel especially fluid at certain magical moments, perhaps especially so for women, and especially women of a certain age. Cassie’s later feelings when they were in college felt a little cliche in comparison, but to be fair, it’s easy to be a cliche in your early 20s, even as you sometimes recognize that you are being one. The point being — there are a few moments of such incredible psychological acuity in the book, they’re really quite dazzling. With Imelda too. Yes, it’s to be expected that the shifts from one perspective to another will reveal new things about characters or situations, but there were some moments here that were genuinely surprising, and revelatory.
Kasia Reads 