Books
The first thing which has to be said about this book is that it is astoundingly mediocre. I'm not saying that it wasn't an enjoyable read, far from it. Nor was it especially badly written; it's just that it fails to live up to the bizarre kind of promise that it shows at the beginning. A young couple are on the road on their way to a new start in a new town with their new baby. Nothing unusual so far, except that the mother of this new baby displays a rather unusual character trait. She is overly superstitious about numbers. I'm not talking here about your average person who religiously uses the same lottery numbers each week. This is O.C.D. on a grand and intricate scale. The number eight for example is a definite no-go area because it was the day on which her brother died. Sixteen on the other hand "appeared a good omen to Bena since it was the number of her father's college football jersey".
Any and every number holds some clue from the fates. The result of this was that by the end of the first fifty pages I was wondering whether the number of calories in my sandwich (341, 3+4+1 = 8) signified the total destruction of the universe or just that I had had too many bags of crisps that day. However, the author appears to have tired of playing this numbers game with her reader by about halfway through the book and stops it without explanation.
The other confusing and slightly annoying thing about Julavits' style is that she doesn't seem quite sure of either her own ability to get her message across, or her reader's ability to understand her. She persistently over- explains and draws out her imagery, so that what would otherwise be a delicate, perceptive and downright lyrical piece of prose seems more like a GCSE English lesson. Having said this, though, the once beautiful and now decaying symbol of hope and prosperity, the numerous canine and bovine deaths, do add to the depressing and futile mood of the characters in this book.
Indeed, it is in her characters and their development that Julavits truly excels. And it is due to this and the strong and coherent story she tells that I can forgive her for her slightly irritating style and near paternalistic attitude.
On the cover of this paperback one reviewer from The Times gushes: "Vickers writes like a haunted angel". Having read the book I can only conclude that haunted angels don't generally make the best authors, but are rather tiresome and ought to stick to their day jobs as guardians of mere mortals or, as in Salley Vickers' case, lecturing in Literature at a university.
From the start she adopts an annoying all-knowing, wise and mysterious tone that grates, stating in the preface: "it is a fact that three is a protean number: under certain conditions it will tend to collapse into two - or expand into four...". This turns out to be an apt description of the plot, which is so untrue to life that you can almost hear the clank of the machinery that Vickers employs off-stage to manipulate the various narrative strands. A deceased unfaithful husband, a bizarrely tolerant wife and a pregnant mistress make up the quirky trinity at the centre of the story. Unexpectedly cut off in his prime, Peter Hansome finds himself jolted in to purgatory, the Catholic stopover between this life and the next. The deplorable absence of duty-free there forces Peter to pass the time haunting his wife and mistress - Bridget and Frances respectively - who, instead of hurling abuse at each other like sensible souls, take to spending cosy weekends in Shropshire together.
It's all frightfully unnatural and it isn't just the fact that I don't believe in ghosts that makes this two-dimensional, but that the motivations and emotions of the characters, along with its brand of half-baked psychology, seem so contrived. They are caricatures of a certain brand of Englishness that has been successfully marketed abroad and is now doing a roaring trade in Great Britain. Unlike that Times reviewer I didn't buy it, and the same would go for the book.
6th Jun 2002