Addition

Books are supposed to make you feel, right? Sometimes you're supposed to come away optimistic about the human condition, sometimes you want to curl up in the tightest ball possible, lock your bedroom door and turn the lights out. Just because the feeling you get is bad doesn't mean the book is bad, or that it's not worthwhile.

So when I say this book made me uncomfortable, I want the context to be preserved. I think it was its goal - to a point. Addition is the story of a woman who's very much in the grips of a counting compulsion - she knows the number of steps it takes to get from one part of her house to the other, then to the cafe, then once she's there she eats the cake she (always) orders in the same number of bits as there are poppyseeds on top. And that's one of the more normal bits.

I don't want to give away the plot, but suffice it to say that things change (several times) once she meets The Guy. And it becomes frustrating and infuriating ... and I think that's on purpose, too? One of the great facets of the book is that in reading how the numbers affect Grace, they really start to get under the nerves of the reader. But it's not an obvious thing. I found myself affected not by the things she was counting, but by the sheer number of numbers she was keeping track of. Having to slog through every one of those numbers is analogous, I imagine - though by no means the same thing - the she was going through. I completely understood/felt like it made sense when one activity had to get called off, simply because I was so exhausted trying to keep up with the nervous counting.

What left me short was the ending. Grace goes through a number of different phases, as we'll call them, from full-on incapacitation by counting to love-fueled powering-through to counseling to back to the way it was ... and then we get to the end. How exactly everything turns out is left up to the reader, but I found myself completely unsure if we were dealing with someone who learned to deal with their compulsion and would be moderating it, was just abandoning themselves to the compulsion devil-may-care, or what. Everything up to and including running away to London would have seemed perfectly in keeping with the character's attitudes, which made it a little frustrating. The entire piece is supposed to be a character study - why can't we learn enough about the character?

Nonetheless, it's an excellent work that will appeal to the normal and the rest of us equally.