Alexandra Kaste

This is truly literary candy. It was a joy to read and I had to ration it so I didn't devour it too quickly (the only other book I've had to do this with was a tree grows in Brooklyn so this is truly an honor). This is the first and only book I've found myself compulsively annotating mainly for vocabulary (also an honor).

Very interesting studies in this book but I think he would have done better to structure it like freakonomics where there isn't an overarching purpose. Because after a while, I began to question it. “Really, Gladwell? The fact that people who are professional food testers aren't fooled by the coke pepsi challenge supports your blink thesis? (that despite everything being tied to it, I'm still not exactly sure what it is)

If I had to describe this book, it would be To Kill a Mockingbird if Atticus Finch was a raging-alcoholic communist. I have no bones with the writing: nice, abrupt prose and skillful character sketches, if sometimes the pacing was a bit repetitious and slow.
But dear God, I finished the book and my only thought was how much time I'd wasted on it. The theme? Uh, don't try to be smart if you're poor and live in the South, I guess? Yeahhh, and that was about it.
I wanted to like the characters, like, any of them. But I couldn't. Horrible things happened to them and I didn't care. I WANTED TO! I PROMISE! I felt like McCullers tries to make them so three-dimensional that they ended up like caricatures. What could have been a strongly empathetic portrait of those looking for education in a backward society kept me at a distance where all I could see was how faintly ridiculous their pretensions were.
McCullers and Harper both looked at the small Southern town, but where McCullers only saw the grime and backwardness of the townspeople, Harper saw hope in the individuals.

My feelings are very complicated. I've always kind of hated the term a problematic fave, but by golly, if this doesn't fit the bill. If I was rating this book solely based on enjoyment I'd give it 5 stars. The characters are so engaging and memorable that they practically erupt from the page. The unreliable narration is fantastically done. The world is claustrophobic and convincing. Overall it's damn fun and tragic at the same time.

But if I take any steps back and think about what this narrative is trying to convince me of, it all crumbles. Some of the issues are right on the surface. For a book trying to convince me of the humanity of marginalized people, it sure manages to caricature and dehumanize the POCs and women. The slurs thrown around in this book made me physically wince on multiple occasions. That meme about male authors writing female character who boob boobily could have been made after reading this.

And the problems aren't only skin deep. In One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the world of the hospital is out of order. The women (specifically unattractive and unmarried women) and black people hold the power and the white men (and our native american narrator) have been robbed of their manhood and convinced that they're weak. Our protagonist comes in and effectively puts these upstarts in their place, beating the black men in a contest of strength and silencing and sexually assaulting the woman in power.

The young sexy girls who put out and the old black man who doesn't seem intimidating are allowed to stay :))

And when you put it like that, it's a helluva lot harder to enjoy.


P.S. I'd be interested to get the perspective of a Native American on Chief Bromden. His depiction is the most sympathetic of all the POCs in the book, but I do wonder if Kesey is romanticizing them. Similarly with the Japanese nurse briefly mentioned.

No one writes characters like Bronte does. Not only does she create the magnificent (self?) portrait of Lucy Snowe–so passionate, so suppressed, so misunderstood–she also creates a fully fleshed out cast of strange, lovable (or not) characters. This is a beautiful book but do not undertake it lightly. Two and a half months after starting it, I'm just now crawling to the finish. 5 stars for my lovely Lucy but like two stars for the pathetic last page and like for all the parts spent examining the infinitely boring Dr. Graham. Bleh.