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This was supposed to be the March book group selection; we ultimately did a book group in Zoom earlier this month. I still had not finished it before book group because I started it so late and failed to take into consideration just how interrupted my life had become with the shutdown.
Lots of things to think about with this book, and I feel that it is in keeping with the characters of the book to be a bit offhandedly cruel with my snarkiness. Please factor that in!
First, wow, these people smoke way too much! They also drink a lot. But the smoking bothered me more than the drinking.
Second, the nature of the narration was just a little odd. Mostly, the book is told from Katey Kontent’s perspective, with a strong Had I But Known vibe. I mean, not in the monster about to get you sense, but in that she is retrospecting from 1966 about the events of 1937, give or take. However, there are occasional sections that are written from Tinker Grey’s perspective; those are all italics. The punctuation is a bit off putting: dialogue is preceded by a line, rather than put in quotation marks.
Third: so, so, so many literary references! KK reads and rereads Great Expectations (yeah, that is a bit of an arch metaphor for the behavior and trajectory of the characters), and she can tell when she is depressed when it holds no joy for her. Ultimately, tho, she switches to Agatha Christie. For someone who is supposed to be so appreciative of prose style, I found that marginally anomalous. But only marginally! Christie and Dickens suffer from a lot of the same problems, so liking them both while appreciating how badly written they both are, and how wooden the march of the characters are to the moral drumbeat of their creators makes some bizarre sort of sense. I guess.
There are very odd moments, like when KK describes a parlor game where there is a journey through a sequence of places, and then someone redescribes it at the end but with changes and the goal is to identify as many things that were changed in the summary vs the original. This is described as more about visualization than about memory. But the whole thing is clearly a topos / memory palace exercise. There cannot be anything more memory than that game! That is just super weird and I do not understand what was meant. That is an example; there are a lot of these scattered through the book. They MIGHT be intended to show KK’s character, but I think that is actually authorial weirdness showing through.
I have walked in NYC recently. I found it implausible that a person could be guided blindfolded through it the way KK and Eve walk Tinker through part of it. Someone would probably break an ankle going up or down a curb. Ditto with the high heels. Maybe that is just my personal clumsiness showing through.
People who loved Towles’ Gentleman in Moscow in our group did not love this one as much. However, the sense of New York in years leading up to the second World War is pretty amazing, and was wildly appreciated by people who grew up there a little bit later.
ETA:
If you ever wanted a book written to showcase what an act that whole blase thing was, this is it.
Lots of things to think about with this book, and I feel that it is in keeping with the characters of the book to be a bit offhandedly cruel with my snarkiness. Please factor that in!
First, wow, these people smoke way too much! They also drink a lot. But the smoking bothered me more than the drinking.
Second, the nature of the narration was just a little odd. Mostly, the book is told from Katey Kontent’s perspective, with a strong Had I But Known vibe. I mean, not in the monster about to get you sense, but in that she is retrospecting from 1966 about the events of 1937, give or take. However, there are occasional sections that are written from Tinker Grey’s perspective; those are all italics. The punctuation is a bit off putting: dialogue is preceded by a line, rather than put in quotation marks.
Third: so, so, so many literary references! KK reads and rereads Great Expectations (yeah, that is a bit of an arch metaphor for the behavior and trajectory of the characters), and she can tell when she is depressed when it holds no joy for her. Ultimately, tho, she switches to Agatha Christie. For someone who is supposed to be so appreciative of prose style, I found that marginally anomalous. But only marginally! Christie and Dickens suffer from a lot of the same problems, so liking them both while appreciating how badly written they both are, and how wooden the march of the characters are to the moral drumbeat of their creators makes some bizarre sort of sense. I guess.
There are very odd moments, like when KK describes a parlor game where there is a journey through a sequence of places, and then someone redescribes it at the end but with changes and the goal is to identify as many things that were changed in the summary vs the original. This is described as more about visualization than about memory. But the whole thing is clearly a topos / memory palace exercise. There cannot be anything more memory than that game! That is just super weird and I do not understand what was meant. That is an example; there are a lot of these scattered through the book. They MIGHT be intended to show KK’s character, but I think that is actually authorial weirdness showing through.
I have walked in NYC recently. I found it implausible that a person could be guided blindfolded through it the way KK and Eve walk Tinker through part of it. Someone would probably break an ankle going up or down a curb. Ditto with the high heels. Maybe that is just my personal clumsiness showing through.
People who loved Towles’ Gentleman in Moscow in our group did not love this one as much. However, the sense of New York in years leading up to the second World War is pretty amazing, and was wildly appreciated by people who grew up there a little bit later.
ETA:
If you ever wanted a book written to showcase what an act that whole blase thing was, this is it.