JESS JUST READS

A BOOK REVIEW BLOG

Purity by Jonathan Franzen

Young Pip Tyler doesn’t know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she’s saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she’s squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother – her only family – is hazardous. But she doesn’t have a clue who her father is, why her mother has always concealed her own real name, or how she can ever have a normal life.

Enter the Germans. A glancing encounter with a German peace activist leads Pip to an internship in South America with The Sunlight Project, an organisation that traffics in all the secrets of the world – including, Pip hopes, the secret of her origins. TSP is the brainchild of Andreas Wolf, a charismatic provocateur who rose to fame in the chaos following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now on the lam in Bolivia, Andreas is drawn to Pip for reasons she doesn’t understand, and the intensity of her response to him upends her conventional ideas of right and wrong.

Finishing this novel felt like finishing a marathon — a long, exhausting marathon where I needed to concentrate on every sentence or I’d miss some vital information. Don’t get me wrong, this novel is fantastic. The writing is beautiful and the characterisation is marvellous and the development of the story is organic and realistic and believable. BUT this novel is an absolute beast. It’s 600 pages of big paragraphs and no chapters. That’s right. There are NO chapters in this novel, just sections. And each section ranges from 80 pages to 150 pages.

Franzen writes flawed characters so well, and pretty much every main character in this novel has a major flaw. Pip (the main character) never knew her father and later in life, she makes a habit of forming inappropriate attractions towards older men. She seems to willingly make mistakes or serious errors in moral judgement, but she is unapologetic and seems unwilling to learn from her mistakes. At times, she seems like a passive character, overshadowed by the characters Tom and Andreas and unsure about her place within the storyline.

Franzen creates these almost unlikeable, flawed characters so that readers can’t not talk about them. I had to take a couple of breaks when reading this book just so I could chat to a couple of my friends who’d read the book. I even stopped reading Purity and read two other novels before going back to it. I needed a break. This book is literature at its best, and each sentence is vital to the storyline. At one point in the novel, an entire storyline was actually a flashback and I didn’t realise. I obviously must have missed the sentence where that flashback started. Franzen gives you the backstory of pretty much every main character, but there always seems to be some ambiguity to their character, and it seems that the only way the reader can come to understand this is to talk about it. And that is one of the many things that Franzen excels at as a writer.

Each section in the novel focuses on a different character, or a different time period. Some sections go into pages-long flashbacks, or pages-long tangents. But Franzen ties it all together and everything makes sense, and the characters’ motives are fleshed out through three-dimensional characterisation and his beautiful, lyrical prose. Just read these wonderful quotes from the book:

“I am in love. I’m the least beautiful girl at Los Volcanes, but I’m funny and brave and honest and he chose me. He can break my heart later—I don’t care” – page 284

“His long sexual drought had recently ended with his bedding of a sophomore poet who was obviously going to shred his heart but hadn’t got around to it yet” – page 349

“Fog spilled from the heights of San Francisco like the liquid it almost was” – page 517

Franzen’s characters all resonate with the reader. Some readers might even relate to these characters and find themselves drawing similarities to Pip or Tom or Andreas or some of the minor characters.

A lot happens in this book. Andreas murders someone and is haunted by it for the rest of his life, and Pip manages to track down her father. Despite the fact that the book is long and very, very detailed (almost too detailed) and there’s about 5000 tangents, Purity is wonderful and well worth the long slog of reading it. I recommend this book to every reader. Even if you only read the first hundred pages, you’ll still be able to admire Franzen’s extraordinary writing ability.

My Score: 10/10

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

Sussex, England. A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother. He hasn’t thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she’d claimed was an ocean) behind the ramshackle old farmhouse, the unremembered past comes flooding back. And it is a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.

I wish that I didn’t know this was written by Neil Gaiman until after I’d read it, because I think I made excuses for the storyline based on the fact that the author is NEIL GAIMAN. But in all honesty, what the hell happened in this book? There was fantasy mixed in with reality and it was all a little confusing, and it was hard to work out what was real and what wasn’t.

Okay, let’s start with the positives. The writing is beautiful. Neil Gaiman can write beautiful, lyrical prose and realistic dialogue. He can construct great characters and he can build upon them with fantastic imagery and description, and the relationships between the main characters seemed authentic and engaging and uniquely brilliant.

But unfortunately, the characters and the quality of the writing were overshadowed by the almost forced (and sometimes unnatural) insertion of fantastical elements into this realistic setting. It detracted from the story, and it stopped me from really appreciating the meaning of the story and the meaning behind the storyline. The fantasy elements stopped me from paying attention to the character relations and the development of the story. I simply read along to find out what happened, but I was no longer as invested in the characters or the story as I was before.

People who love Neil Gaiman will love this book because it’s Neil Gaiman. People who haven’t read Neil Gaiman might be a bit disappointed with the book. If you’re planning on reading this book, then I’ll give you one piece of advice: read it with an open mind.

My Score: 6/10

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

What if you grew up to realise that your father had used your childhood as an experiment?

Rosemary doesn’t talk very much, and about certain things she’s silent. She had a sister, Fern, her whirlwind other half, who vanished from her life in circumstances she wishes she could forget. And it’s been ten years since she last saw her beloved older brother Lowell.

Now at college, Rosemary starts to see that she can’t go forward without going back, back to the time when, aged five, she was sent away from home to her grandparents and returned to find Fern gone.

I liked this book, but I didn’t love this book. I finished it, but I didn’t finish it eagerly. It was more a case of ‘well I’ll finish it because it’s not a long book and it was nominated for the Man Booker and I’m actually almost at the end’.

The plot was a little slow and dull and kept jumping back and forth between past and present so much that I often lost track of where I was up to. I didn’t care for the characters as much as I should. Rosemary seemed too distant from the reader and I couldn’t relate to her at all. She is weak and comes across as whiny. Although the author unveils so many issues surrounding animal cruelty and animal/human dynamic, the characters weren’t strong enough for me to enjoy the story.

On the front of the book, there’s a quote about how there’s an amazing ‘twist’ in this book. What you don’t realise is that this twist comes 1/3 of the way through the novel and not at the end of it. So the only part in the novel where you’re actually intrigued enough to keep reading is when that twist is revealed. But then after another 50 pages, you’re bored again with the plot and the rest of the novel is just slow and there’s not enough drive for the reader to want to keep going.

I don’t regret reading this novel because the plot is unique, but it didn’t engage me enough to reread it or recommend that others read it. Harsh, but true.

My Score: 5/10
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The Children Act by Ian McEwan

Fiona Maye is a High Court judge in London presiding over cases in family court. She is fiercely intelligent, well respected, and deeply immersed in the nuances of her particular field of law. Often the outcome of a case seems simple from the outside, the course of action to ensure a child’s welfare obvious. But the law requires more rigor than mere pragmatism, and Fiona is expert in considering the sensitivities of culture and religion when handing down her verdicts.

But Fiona’s professional success belies domestic strife. Her husband, Jack, asks her to consider an open marriage and, after an argument, moves out of their house. His departure leaves her adrift, wondering whether it was not love she had lost so much as a modern form of respectability; whether it was not contempt and ostracism she really fears. She decides to throw herself into her work, especially a complex case involving a seventeen-year-old boy whose parents will not permit a lifesaving blood transfusion because it conflicts with their beliefs as Jehovah’s Witnesses. But Jack doesn’t leave her thoughts, and the pressure to resolve the case—as well as her crumbling marriage—tests Fiona in ways that will keep readers thoroughly enthralled until the last stunning page.

I really wanted to like this short novel because it’s written by Ian McEwan, but truthfully, I found it slow and dry.

The main character seems a little devoid of emotion, and maybe that’s the point (her husband wants her blessing to have an affair). But when she meets a child whose parents refuse a life-saving because of their religious beliefs, she still seems to have the personality of a stone.

The story weaves between the apparent breakdown of her marriage and the court case, and the most interesting and engaging part of the entire novel is the during the court case when she has to decide and justify her decision about forcing the boy to have a blood transfusion. Apart from that, the story just seems to plod along with short dialogue and a bit too much description.

The good thing about this novel is that it’s only 200 pages, so it’s easy to finish quite quickly. I’d recommend this novel to literary readers and McEwan fans. As for everybody else, keep in mind that this novel is good and it’s well written, but it’s not a page-turner – I could easily put it down for three days and pick it up again and not have it concern me. This book exists for the literary prose and the moral themes it unearths, not for the thrilling plot or interesting and relatable characters.

My Score: 5/10
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The Rosie Project (Don Tillman #1) by Graeme Simsion

Don Tillman, professor of genetics, has never been on a second date. He is a man who can count all his friends on the fingers of one hand, whose lifelong difficulty with social rituals has convinced him that he is simply not wired for romance. So when an acquaintance informs him that he would make a “wonderful” husband, his first reaction is shock. Yet he must concede to the statistical probability that there is someone for everyone, and he embarks upon The Wife Project. In the orderly, evidence-based manner with which he approaches all things, Don sets out to find the perfect partner. She will be punctual and logical—most definitely not a barmaid, a smoker, a drinker, or a late-arriver.

Yet Rosie Jarman is all these things. She is also beguiling, fiery, intelligent—and on a quest of her own. She is looking for her biological father, a search that a certain DNA expert might be able to help her with. Don’s Wife Project takes a back burner to the Father Project and an unlikely relationship blooms, forcing the scientifically minded geneticist to confront the spontaneous whirlwind that is Rosie—and the realization that love is not always what looks good on paper.

I feel like this is one of those books that would’ve been a risk at acquisitions time – you don’t know if it’s going to sell well or not sell at all. And then, of course, the book actually becomes a phenomenon and receives rave reviews.

This novel is funny, but not necessarily a laugh-out-loud funny. It’s more a quiet chuckle or an amused smile. This isn’t a bad thing – Graeme has written the main character Don Tillman so believably that you’re not actually chuckling at him, but at the absurd things that he does. Like creating a survey for women to fill out, and they have to answer every question correct for Don to consider them a candidate for the Wife Project. Don has Asperger’s syndrome, but he doesn’t know it. But the reader is aware of it from the very first page – Graeme has captured his schedule and his personality and his subjective perspective perfectly.

Don is an unusual protagonist, but I really like him. I like that he evolves over the course of the novel – he seems to forget about his routine, and in his own way, goes after Rosie. The love story between Don and Rosie is behind-the-scenes, and doesn’t actually feel like a love story. Don is not the typical brooding lead male in the story, and doesn’t attempt to whisk Rosie off her feet. In fact, he’d probably argue that whisking someone of their feet is impossible, a cliché, and too vague to actually achieve.

Despite Don being extremely intelligent, he also possess a certain level of naivety. And although this probably comes from him having Asperger’s Syndrome, it is also a writing achievement.

My Score: 8/10
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