I had heard good things about this book and was intrigued by the idea that it was all stream of consciousness. My dad bought himself a copy when he saw that it was a contender for the Man Booker Award. We both tend to like books that get selected by the Man Booker, but he hadn’t heard anything else about it, so he had no idea what he was getting himself into. He tried to read it and gave up, but was going to give it another try when we went on vacation together at the end of August. I knew it was the only time I would have to devote long stretches to reading, which would give me my best shot at tackling this monstrosity (the paperback is 988 pages). So I stole my dad’s copy and read the first half while we were on vacation. I tried to finish it on vacation, but we only had a week and, as previously mentioned, it’s 988 pages.
It did take me a while to get into the flow of the writing style, but once I did, I found that I was able to move through it pretty quickly.
If you’re unfamiliar with the book, not only is it stream of consciousness, but there’s no real punctuation to speak of except for certain, short sections, which I’ll get to later. There are commas to spare, but no periods and no dialogue. Someone who read it before I did alerted me to the fact that the author uses “the fact that” to introduce new thoughts, which means you can just skim over those 3 words when they pop up, and they do pop up a lot because they’re used as a kind of punctuation between sentences instead of periods. The only problem was that once or twice “the fact that” was actually part of the sentence, so I would have to go back and read it in order for everything else the character was thinking to make sense.
You’re inside this woman’s head as she goes through life and thinking about all kinds of things. She skips from one thought to another without segue because that’s how people think. And she often inserts lists or fragments from songs and/or movies, so I just skimmed those parts, which is how I got through 988 pages as quickly as I did.
The MC (who is never named) is happily married with 4 kids, although her oldest is from a previous marriage to a Native American, so in addition to the fact that the daughter is going through the usual teenage stuff, she’s also dealing with feeling abandoned by her father and like an outsider in her own family, both because of the fact that she has a different father and because she’s the only one who’s not white. Her mom does her best, but is completely oblivious to everything her daughter is going through and doesn’t even register the fact that race plays a big role in her daughter’s life and self identity. Also, if you name your child after Eustacia Vye, what do you think is going to happen?
While she’s thinking about how to deal with her daughter, the MC bakes pies and cinnamon rolls for local shops. It doesn’t pay very well, but she enjoys it, and her husband’s job as a college professor pays for everything else.
Mostly the MC just worries about everything, specifically global warming and gun violence, especially gun violence against women. I normally read at night before bed, but this character is always so anxious that she made me anxious and I started to wonder if reading such an anxiety-producing book right before bed was really such a good idea.
I mentioned that there are some short sections that do have punctuation and those sections focus on a lioness who gives birth to three cubs, and one night while she’s out hunting, some people find the cubs, assume they’ve been abandoned, and take them to the local zoo. When she realizes her cubs are gone, the lioness starts frantically looking everywhere for them. She goes in circles, methodically covering as much ground as possible without realizing she’s terrorizing the entire human population in three states because she just keeps showing up all over the place. She never harms a human, just kills animals for food and then keeps going.
I kept waiting for the lioness to cross paths with the MC and thought that would be the end of the book, but they don’t run into each other. The closest they get is the lioness ends up in the MC’s back yard one night trying to get to her chickens, but is startled by the dog they just got, who then proceeds to wriggle out of his collar and follow the lioness on her adventures. Rest assured that nothing bad happens to the dog and the lioness is eventually reunited with her cubs, albeit in captivity.
On the whole, I think I liked this book? I didn’t love it, and I definitely didn’t like it 988 pages worth. I think the book would have been much better if it had been 300-400 pages shorter than it is.