Before I leave for my travels each summer, my friend Rory and I usually go book shopping where he recommends for me several good books and I try to scare up one good book that I've read that isn't from high school or isn't entitled something like
Nancy Drew and the Mystery of Lilac Ranch. I usually leave the bookstore with a magnificent selection of books that I can hardly wait to begin, and he leaves with books he doesn't care about. This is one of the differences between creative writing majors and art history majors.
This year, however, was different. This year, I didn't go home to be sheltered in the literary wing of Rory under the glow of the Barnes and Noble lights. No, I had to be content with a hurried recommendation via phone as Rory hurried off to some concert, and he got no book recommendation at all because my reading material for the summer looked something like
Winslow Homer: Artist and Angler,
Winslow Homer, Winslow Homer: The Nature of Observation, or
The Watercolors of Winslow Homer, none of which I believe would appeal to Rory Kelly.
This year the book title I was able to weasel out of Rory was
As She Climbed Across the Table, which I went and bought the other day and finished in about 24 hours, not because it was good but because, ala
The Perks of Being a Wallflower, it was that bad and I figured it should be like ripping off a bandaid. Just do it in one fell swoop. The book was littered with obvious metaphors that would drive the point home without a shadow of a doubt (which I hate) and with nearly every sentence I felt like I could see the author sitting at his computer thinking "This sentence is going to be beautiful because I am going to create a beautiful image in it using beautiful words." It felt like it was being written for high school students whose sole purpose in being in a literature class (and therefore, their goal in life) is to find the allusions, alliterations, imagery, metonymy, and so on and so forth, in a book.
To spare everyone the time, the book is about a physicist who falls in love with a man-made universe called Lack. Her boyfriend tries to win her back, but in the end what happens is he crawls into Lack, becoming Lack itself, and the physicist girlfriend ends up crawling into Lack because she's still in love with Lack. The boyfriend BECOMES Lack, ironically becoming what he lacks and what the girlfriend wanted in him! DO YOU GET IT? The metaphors and messages can unfortunately be carried in such a fashion to no end. And I know bad plotlines shouldn't bother me, but what bothers me is that someone can publish a book and then have the back filled with reviews reading "An oddball tour de force" -
Entertainment Weekly and "Lethem is opening blue sky for American fiction... He is rapidly evolving into his own previously uncataloged species" -
Village Voice Literary Supplement. How did Lethem open up American fiction? Can we now expect books to be published where all the literary techniques will be included in captions after the period in a sentence or hints like "Now think about this with the big picture in mind" will be peppered throughout a page? Where the reader will not have to think at all? I suppose since people are getting lazier in general and maybe since Cliff's Notes doesn't do EVERYTHING, yes, Lethem did open up new, bluer skies for American fiction.
With that said, the basic idea of the book is interesting because it does have a new universe. And with THAT said, NOW go and read the book.
I am going to Costa Rica in the morning, armed with a different book that unfortunately has scenes from a Major! Motion! Picture! plastered across its cover. I won't even bother going into what I hate about books like that.
