Intuition (Allegra Goodman)
I read Allegra Goodman before (see Kaaterskill Falls) and I rated that freshman effort a 2.5 out of 5 stars. And I think I was as impressed with her mediocrity last time as I was this go-around. I can just see this woman, who I know — I can TELL — is an intelligent, thoughtful human being standing in a room, looking out a window, casting around for something to write her next book about. Terminal disease? No. Love? No. Nuclear holocaust? No. Then she picks up a Scientific American and says, Yes! Biomedical ethics! That’s best-selling shit, for sure.
And she would have been right. It was best-selling. It just wasn’t good. Not inspired in the least. Characters I got to know but not care about who did things that I could have predicted in the first 100 pages. Worse, the narrator goes off for paragraphs about these characters perfectly obvious thoughts: He was an ambitious man. She felt jilted. Really? I kind of intuited that from the fact that he was a cancer researcher hoping his experiment is publishable and she just got dumped. It doesn’t take a genius, people.
But worst of all, there on almost every page is one of my biggest, most bitched-about pet peeves in writing EVER: an omniscient narrator that switches between the characters heads, knowing all of their intimate thoughts, all at once. In this case, she could often switch brains three times on one page and I wanted to scream: My god, woman! You might as well type “I am taking the easy way out of telling a story” on your keyboard. Lazy, uninspired woman. Wait, did I say uninspired already? I did? Well, she deserves it twice.
Come back to me Allegra, darling, when you have something that has grabbed your heart to write about, something that springs from deep in your brain that is genuinely yours, that teaches me something about the world that I didn’t know or hadn’t seen in that way before. Don’t give me words and actions to fill up a page and create a plot arc. Give me a hearty meal instead of fast food. Again, you seem like a very intelligent woman with a good grasp of the written word. Just a little genuine inspiration (there’s that word again) might do the trick. Of course, I’m a little blocked myself at the moment, so perhaps we could spread it around, yes?
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars - Vacation reading
Fiction, Repeated Author |