Last night I stayed up way later than I should have considering how itchy my throat was. I only did this because I was 50 pages away from finishing Her Fearful Symmetry. There was no way I was going to go to sleep without finishing it, because there is nothing I hate more than finishing a book on my lunch break and still have 30 minutes left before I must return to my desk to shoot hate-beams in to back of Twit's head. What productive thing can one do in 30 minutes after finishing a book? Hang out with the smokers? Hope that turtle I scared off earlier when I was trying to take its picture comes back to sunbathe on the rock some more? Really, those 30 minutes would probably be better spent at my desk playing on Facebook or reading various blogs or Salon. But then I'd be at my desk 30 minutes before I had to, and that is just really pathetic. Like I'm one of those kids who is totally frightened of recess, and would rather sit inside and watch the teacher grade papers in the hopes that I can enter the grades on the class computer. Lame.
So, feeling drowsy with a closing airway, I finished Her Fearful Symmetry. I'm still not sure it was the right decision. Upon waking this morning, I felt like death (kind of ironic considering the book), and had only a little squeaky voice to call in to work to say I would be running late due to having my lungs removed during the night, dipped in a vat of chunky mucus, left out to dry a bit, and then reinserted back in to me. When I find the bastard that played that dirty trick on me, I'm totally sending a pack of angry weasels to shred his balls in to tiny chicken-skin pieces.
Spoiler Alert: Stop reading the rest of this post, and just relish the ideas of what weasels can do to a man's testicles when they put their minds to it.
What I am about to say makes me a bit tearful, and not just because I'm choking on my own snot. I have the feeling of a dirty trick being pulled on me, and that editor(s) may have really formed the beauty of The Time Traveler's Wife. In that good ol' Audrey came up with a fantastic, riveting plot and the editor's put the magic in to it. Then it was a huge success, and Audrey asked for more leeway, a little more say in the editing process. Hey, if my first novel was a huge runaway bestseller that left Oprah sobbing on her couch, and movie deal (that Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston were originally considered for), then fuck yes, I probably would have made some demands, too. Sadly, oh so sadly, her follow-up book was sophomoric in more ways than one. Perhaps it is partially my fault that I feel so let down, my expectations were extraordinarily high, especially for a pessimist such as myself.
In college, I had to read stuff like this all the damn time. I critiqued it like I was some curmudgeonly bitch from on high. We're talking comparing some one's story to a douche commercial kind of critiques. Ok, that is still pretty awesome, and I stand by it. If Audrey's book had landed in my lap in college, I may have been a bit nicer because it isn't terrible. It just didn't make me want to stay up all night skipping bathroom and food breaks either. It is average. It needed some serious editing, or at least some one's strong guiding hand to ask the really tough questions, like, "Audrey do you think you have a point here...and here, oh, and there?" Or, "Um, don't you think your reading audiences are totally going to know exactly what you are up to when you experiment pulling that kitten's soul out that second time?" Jesus. I know I've read a lot of books and can smell the plot twist before the first half of the book, but really? She didn't even develop the characters enough to leave me guessing if that was really where she was going or not. That at least would have been fun. Will she or won't she? Parts of this book seemed to have been written by a lonely 16-year-old girl who envied the goth and punk kids at school, wanted to be like them, but could only admire their Doc Martens and fishnet stockings from afar. These instances were so painfully contrived, I actually found myself embarrassed for Audrey that she felt the need to stick such unnecessary descriptors in to the plot. Really, the ghost of the woman haunting the flat is wearing that? REALLY? That women that we don't know at all since she died like on page 2, but we are supposed to take seriously that in her late 40s or early 50s was prone to wearing such teen girl stuff? I know that Mia Farrow likes her white tees, blue jeans and Docs, who doesn't? That is fine, but not the full-on goth dress, fishnets and lime boots or what ever fucking color they were in the book. Oh, man, I just wanted to weep. If you really needed some one to wear those clothes, have one of the 21-year-old twins do it. I'm calling a great big foul on that bullshit. It was instances like that that really brought me out of the book. There were some lovely areas, the ones that seemed well-researched: the cemetery and shops in London. There was a validity that rang through those pages, an obvious love that could be incorporated in to the story without pushing a huge pink elephant in to the room just because you happen to love huge pink elephants.
It is kind of like John Irving with his bears, Vienna, Indian motorcycles and wrestling. It's always there, and at first he could make it work because it was new and fun; then it stopped being charming and you just waited for the first reference to one of those things in the next book, and kind of groaned, and said, "Uncle Johnny, please get over it already and find a new fad to attach yourself to, like global warming and recycling." The Time Traveler's Wife also had these moments of an outsider looking in, wishing to have been that cool person who attended a Violent Femme's concert, so she wrote about it. However, the trick was there was time traveling involved, everything seemed to be in its place and was part of the story. There wasn't a hint of trying to hard, of being the dirtiest of words, a "poser."
Looking at the picture of Audrey Niffenegger on the dust cover, I totally know she was one of those girls who absolutely wished she could wear black-and-white striped tights and dye her hair purple, and maybe get a nose ring and a small appropriately place tattoo like on the inside of her wrist, but that she knew that no one would take her seriously. That she had stepped too far out of her own comfortable boundaries to pull if off, which is understandable. It happens to all of us, but you don't write your teenager fantasies in to a book and hope that no one doesn't notice, because you still end up looking like that awkward girl who showed up at the party with a bad dye job, purple marks staining her temple where she naively forgot to put Vaseline on before dying her hair. Her tights bunching around the ankles of her skinny legs and a red nose from an at-home piercing that just won't quite stop seeping stinky ooze. If you fear being a poser in real life and can't pull it off, chances are you aren't going to have any more confidence to fit it in to a book, because we are evil, judgmental readers who can sniff your insecurity right through a page. I'm sorry Audrey, it's true. Get your editor back, come up with the good stories, write them and let me get back to loving you already.
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