This book (especially hot on the heels of some scathing reviews of other books) made me ponder if all writing about polyamory is cringe, and what is that makes it so. My hunch is that writing about love or desire can seem profoundly narcissistic, especially when it’s about getting “more” than what is socially sanctioned? Because I generally don’t feel this way at all when talking to my polyamorous friends about their lives and partners — it’s more when reading published accounts that it’s hard to keep from rolling your eyes. Even though, in this specific book, I also really liked the meditation on various kinds of love and the relationships they shape.
What actually irritated me more in this novel — though this feels like grumpiness on my part — is how obviously it was drawn from real-life experiences. I know, I know, autofiction. And the fact that I read (and loved) her memoir, Also a Poet, is of course part of the problem. But I really think that the issue here was not so much the character details (how many people have a famous parent, etc), but something in the writing — it read like a personal essay rather than a novel, especially at the opening, when it seemed loaded down with tangential observations.
But then I read Jo Hamya’s review (which I was extra pleased to see, because I read her novel The Hypocrite awhile back and really loved it) and she argued that various plot devices were extremely heavy handed, and I thought huh, that’s true, so maybe they are actually invented? (Then I read an interview with Calhoun online and it was clear that at least one — a well-timed fellowship — was not!). My point is, maybe it’s a sign of an effective fiction, one that is really REALLY realist, that I think grouchily, “well this can’t be made up, it’s too much like life.”
In her (really smart) review, Hamya says “Only occasionally do I feel moved to write a review in the first-person, usually when I sense that any critique of the book might be outweighed (positively or negatively) by my own unavoidable biases.” And I find myself wondering if this book in particular is a kind of Rorschach test; you can’t really opine on it without feeling like your own views about the issue are clouding your vision — you cannot suspend judgment. I couldn’t engage this narrator as a wholly fictional character, a walking thought experiment — she was instead a thinly veiled actual person (who a friend of mine is quite fond of, moreover, therefore who I feel strangely obligated to also like, at least until given definitive in-person reason not to).
But I should also say that for all my frustrations, I absolutely gobbled the book down, with pleasurably irritated absorption. The main character irritated me for many of the reasons that Hamya identifies. But being judgy is kind of fun, sometimes.
Kasia Reads 