Tries to be grand and impressive in a Donna Tartt kind of way and doesn't get there.
Interesting in that it’s also an obsession story — but this time the main character is a man who falls for an older woman, which made for a nice juxtaposition with my previous read. That’s where the interest ended for me. The main character’s emotions felt false, selfish, and lame — emotionally transactional in a way that kept me at a distance the whole way through. The book deals with genuinely heady subjects (fidelity, nontraditional love, death) but at the end I didn’t feel fulfilled or enlightened, just wondering what the point was. The prose is genuinely nice — well-written at the sentence level. But nothing stuck. It tries to be grand and impressive in a Donna Tartt kind of way and doesn’t get there.
Vibes
- obsession
- an older woman
- ambitious literary fiction
- genuinely nice prose
- nothing stuck
Would recommend to
Anyone looking for an obsession tale with a non-traditional, non-heterosexual male main character, ambitious literary fiction framing, and genuinely nice prose. Just go in knowing the ambition outpaces the execution.
Part of
Obsession stories
Also reviewed: What It's Like in Words