I am a feminist. This should not surprise you, reader. I am a woman, and I like to think of myself as a human, and I would be simply delighted if others would think of me the same way.I have spent much of my life angry because of this belief that I, as a woman, deserve to be treated as though I hold the same value as men do. Lately, I've been finding my hold on that angry slipping. There is only so much outrage I can muster, as a woman - outrage for the bosses who stare at our breasts during annual reviews; outrage for the retailers who insist that zero is a size rather than an indicator of absence; outrage for the world that tells us to either sit down or bend over.
Lately, I've just been... tired. It's a kind of fatigue - I see a politician insisting that he understands the needs of women better than we do, and I can't always muster my usual anger.
I relieve that weariness by reminding myself: they oppress us because they fear us. If we were truly powerless, reader, they would not bother with us at all.
A Sudden Light by the ruminative Garth Stein...
...is disappointing.
The book tells the coming-of-age story of a young man who spends a summer discovering his roots. The story plays with themes of familial strife, adolescent self-discovery, transcendentalism, and the weight of ancestral guilt. It's a lot of story, and it's written with just enough intrigue to haul the reader through the muddier sections of plot. Let's explore.
Trevor Riddell, age 14, is enduring familial upheaval - his parents are separating, and for the duration of that separation, he is going to stay at the family estate in Seattle. His ancestry is rooted (ha! rooted. You'll get the pun in a moment) in wealth garnered from the merciless exploitation of American lumber (see? rooted!). Trevor's father and his Aunt Serena (more on her in the spoilers) are hoping to tear down the apparently decrepit family estate and sell the land to developers. The only obstacle: the living patriarch of the family, whose mind seems to be crumbling, and who refuses to sign over the rights to the land.
We know all of this because Trevor is an aspiring writer. I will write a review at some point that addresses my opinions on narrator-as-struggling-writer, but for now, please be satisfied with the knowledge that I do not hold the practice in particularly high esteem. The boy spends the story exploring the family estate, attempting to understand his place in the family and in the world, and oh, by the way, interacting with the ghost of one of his ancestors. Yes, reader, this is also a ghost story! Delightful.
That's not a sarcastic 'delightful': I adore ghost stories. I also love family mysteries and family dramas. I am not as keen on coming-of-age, but I trusted Garth Stein to handle that well. And he did! The boy is written with a great deal of realism (lots of self-examination, lots of confusing erections, habitual submission to authority - Stein captures the horrors of being fourteen with unflinching honesty). There are few easy answers, and the ghost serves brilliantly to solidify the complexities involved in what will happen to the family estate.
Unfortunately, the ghost serves a lot of purposes in this book, and the above purpose is the extent of the brilliance. Otherwise, the ghost serves as exposition, depositing information into Trevor at a glacial pace. Because the ghost is apparently limited to revealing important information one dream at a time, the reader must endure interludes of navel-gazing reflections on transcendentalism, uncomfortably sexual interactions with Aunt Serena, and endless reminders of the internal struggle at the heart of the story (that is: should Trevor betray the ghost, or betray his father?).
These repetitive sections are written in a mind-numbingly stilted style, and weigh the story down terribly. An excerpt:
"We are all connected. The living to the nonliving, as the nonliving to the living. All things in all directions in all times. It is only in the physical dimension that we have limitations. (The membrane between us is thinner than you think.)"
...It may be thematically appropriate for a book about a fourteen-year-old boy to be slightly masturbatory, but there are limits to what I'll forgive in the name of voice.
Now, for Spoilers.
The book tells the coming-of-age story of a young man who spends a summer discovering his roots. The story plays with themes of familial strife, adolescent self-discovery, transcendentalism, and the weight of ancestral guilt. It's a lot of story, and it's written with just enough intrigue to haul the reader through the muddier sections of plot. Let's explore.
Trevor Riddell, age 14, is enduring familial upheaval - his parents are separating, and for the duration of that separation, he is going to stay at the family estate in Seattle. His ancestry is rooted (ha! rooted. You'll get the pun in a moment) in wealth garnered from the merciless exploitation of American lumber (see? rooted!). Trevor's father and his Aunt Serena (more on her in the spoilers) are hoping to tear down the apparently decrepit family estate and sell the land to developers. The only obstacle: the living patriarch of the family, whose mind seems to be crumbling, and who refuses to sign over the rights to the land.
We know all of this because Trevor is an aspiring writer. I will write a review at some point that addresses my opinions on narrator-as-struggling-writer, but for now, please be satisfied with the knowledge that I do not hold the practice in particularly high esteem. The boy spends the story exploring the family estate, attempting to understand his place in the family and in the world, and oh, by the way, interacting with the ghost of one of his ancestors. Yes, reader, this is also a ghost story! Delightful.
That's not a sarcastic 'delightful': I adore ghost stories. I also love family mysteries and family dramas. I am not as keen on coming-of-age, but I trusted Garth Stein to handle that well. And he did! The boy is written with a great deal of realism (lots of self-examination, lots of confusing erections, habitual submission to authority - Stein captures the horrors of being fourteen with unflinching honesty). There are few easy answers, and the ghost serves brilliantly to solidify the complexities involved in what will happen to the family estate.
Unfortunately, the ghost serves a lot of purposes in this book, and the above purpose is the extent of the brilliance. Otherwise, the ghost serves as exposition, depositing information into Trevor at a glacial pace. Because the ghost is apparently limited to revealing important information one dream at a time, the reader must endure interludes of navel-gazing reflections on transcendentalism, uncomfortably sexual interactions with Aunt Serena, and endless reminders of the internal struggle at the heart of the story (that is: should Trevor betray the ghost, or betray his father?).
These repetitive sections are written in a mind-numbingly stilted style, and weigh the story down terribly. An excerpt:
"We are all connected. The living to the nonliving, as the nonliving to the living. All things in all directions in all times. It is only in the physical dimension that we have limitations. (The membrane between us is thinner than you think.)"
Now, for Spoilers.
Serena (the Aunt) is one of the worst-written female characters I have ever had the misfortune of encountering.
She is also one of the only female characters in the book. There is the mother, but she is a faint outline of a character with perhaps a page of action total. Since Stein didn't see fit to bother with the distant mother (and isn't that revealing?), we won't bother with her either.
Serena is everything that men fear about women. She is her father's caretaker, and uses that power to destroy him - for no discernible reason. Surely she could just kill the man, or abandon him? But instead, she tortures him via sleep deprivation, intentional misuse of medication, emotional and verbal abuse, and relentless gaslighting. Her treatment of her father is the most frightening scenario imaginable for an aging man - the Evil Nurse, who tortures her enfeebled male charge.
She is also a deeply frightening sexual temptress, wielding her sexuality with ruthless understanding of exactly what the men of the book want and fear. Early in the book, we learn that she uses sex to bargain with a property developer, literally screwing him out of part of the profit that will result from the transaction. She comes very close to sexually abusing our fourteen-year-old protagonist, constantly taking advantage of his confused lust but stopping just short of explicit sexual interaction. Most importantly, all of her scheming is directed toward bedding her older brother (Trevor's father). This is revealed at the end of the book but is not a surprise to the reader (nor to the characters): she is desperately attracted to a brother she hasn't seen since childhood, and spends most of the book seducing him.
Reader, Serena is the biggest reason that the book rates "tiresome" rather than "satisfactory". Had she been a comprehensibly written character, I could have borne the navel-gazing reflections on the interconnectedness of the universe and the lazy ghost-driven exposition; but Serena is written as the embodiment of a Crazy Bitch, and I cannot abide it. At the end of the book, she burns the house down while Trevor and his grandfather watch her dance, and Trevor's father dies attempting to rescue her from the flames. That ending cements her as a frightened man's worst nightmare: a woman who hypnotizes helpless men using her body, and destroys them by taking advantage of their deep-down heroism.
This does not anger or sadden me; it wearies me. When I read this story by an author I admired, and found that his two female characters were (1) a distant spectre of motherhood; and (2) a looming demon of feminine deceit and betrayal - I did not want to rail at Stein in righteous outrage. Instead, I wanted to ask him: "Was this really the best you could do for her?"
She is also one of the only female characters in the book. There is the mother, but she is a faint outline of a character with perhaps a page of action total. Since Stein didn't see fit to bother with the distant mother (and isn't that revealing?), we won't bother with her either.
Serena is everything that men fear about women. She is her father's caretaker, and uses that power to destroy him - for no discernible reason. Surely she could just kill the man, or abandon him? But instead, she tortures him via sleep deprivation, intentional misuse of medication, emotional and verbal abuse, and relentless gaslighting. Her treatment of her father is the most frightening scenario imaginable for an aging man - the Evil Nurse, who tortures her enfeebled male charge.
She is also a deeply frightening sexual temptress, wielding her sexuality with ruthless understanding of exactly what the men of the book want and fear. Early in the book, we learn that she uses sex to bargain with a property developer, literally screwing him out of part of the profit that will result from the transaction. She comes very close to sexually abusing our fourteen-year-old protagonist, constantly taking advantage of his confused lust but stopping just short of explicit sexual interaction. Most importantly, all of her scheming is directed toward bedding her older brother (Trevor's father). This is revealed at the end of the book but is not a surprise to the reader (nor to the characters): she is desperately attracted to a brother she hasn't seen since childhood, and spends most of the book seducing him.
Reader, Serena is the biggest reason that the book rates "tiresome" rather than "satisfactory". Had she been a comprehensibly written character, I could have borne the navel-gazing reflections on the interconnectedness of the universe and the lazy ghost-driven exposition; but Serena is written as the embodiment of a Crazy Bitch, and I cannot abide it. At the end of the book, she burns the house down while Trevor and his grandfather watch her dance, and Trevor's father dies attempting to rescue her from the flames. That ending cements her as a frightened man's worst nightmare: a woman who hypnotizes helpless men using her body, and destroys them by taking advantage of their deep-down heroism.
This does not anger or sadden me; it wearies me. When I read this story by an author I admired, and found that his two female characters were (1) a distant spectre of motherhood; and (2) a looming demon of feminine deceit and betrayal - I did not want to rail at Stein in righteous outrage. Instead, I wanted to ask him: "Was this really the best you could do for her?"
Rating: Tiresome.
Possible ratings: Magnificent, Divine, Satisfactory, Tiresome, Lamentable, Execrable. This is a blog about words, what rating system did you expect?
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