Divergent: Am I the only person who didn't like this book? (#35)

Spoilers, discussing the ENTIRE plot...

Veronica Roth's Divergent is supposed to be the next YA lit sensation - Summit Entertainment has already snapped the film rights up and it has 332 five-star Amazon reviews - but I thought it fell flat. I'm actually surprised that it has such an ardent fan base because I think has a couple of major flaws, including a lack of tension, a premise that doesn't hold up under scrutiny, and an inconsistent protagonist. It got to the point where I couldn't wait for the book to end, never a good sign.

The Divergent world is limited to a futuristic Chicago where society has broken itself up into five factions based on the members' personalities: There's Dauntless (courageous), Candor (honest), Amity (friendly), Erudite (learned), and Abnegation (selfless), which is the faction protagonist Beatrice Prior comes from. People without factions are homeless and live in the no-man's land between the faction areas. When children turn 16, they must take an aptitude test which tells them which faction they're meant for, and then at a ceremony, they can choose whichever faction they want to belong to. If they leave their own faction, they lose their family. When Beatrice takes her test, she gets a mixed result - she could be good in Dauntless, Abnegation, or Erudite - which makes her, egads, Divergent. It's so bad that her tester deletes her results and makes Beatrice swear she'll never tell anyone what happened.

When the choosing ceremony comes, Beatrice decides to betray her family and choose Dauntless. But it wasn't all that surprising and I think this was the first mistake in the book - Roth spends very little time describing Beatrice's life in Abnegation or her parents, so there's no attachment for the reader (which is absolutely essential at the end of the book). So when she chooses another faction, it's like who cares? All we really knew about Abnegation was that it was a place where you could only look in the mirror once every 90 days and children weren't to speak at the dinner table - and who wants to live like that? Beatrice's decision seems pretty easy, which leads to Divergent's second flaw...

Despite the interesting premise, the book lacked tension - and this was an utter failure in the set-up. In most books, the protagonist struggles against a force greater than themselves, and they are often shoved into this struggle without a choice. This always happens at the beginning, creating tension and epic, life-or-death struggle that sucks the reader in. In Harry Potter, Harry starts out ignorant but quickly finds out that he's survived an attack by the wizarding world's most powerful dark lord; in the Hunger Games, Katniss immediately sacrifices herself for her sister and must figure out how fight to the death to survive a regime that sacrifices teenagers; in Persuasion, Anne struggles from the get-go against society's preconceived notion that she's too old for love; even Twilight has it, presenting this idea of true-love-at-first-sight potentially doomed by unavoidable natural tendencies (i.e. wanting to suck your lover's blood). But Divergent completely lacks this kind of set-up as the conflict is introduced WAY too late in the novel; as a result, the novel meanders in terms of plot. Starting out the novel, it's unknown why the world came to this (or even whether the world is more than Chicago now) and there's no desire for renewal or return, so no conflict there. There's no real conflict with the apititude test; regardless of the results, teenagers can choose whichever faction they want, so no one's being forced into anything. Beatrice freely chooses Dauntless and even though initiation is tough and she has to get into the top 10, she never really regrets her choice. We don't know why being Divergent is bad until p. 154, that it's life or death, and despite a bit of displayed prejudice against Abnegation, we don't know that there's actually something happening against them until about page 200. This is out of 295 pages (on my Nook anyway).

Beatrice always gets to choose - and everything that happens to her in the first 240 pages or so emerges from her choices. There's no huge struggle - for the most part, until the factions start trying to kill each other at the end, it's a really simple story about a girl trying to fit in to a new environment. Most of Divergent could easily have been set in a high school, as new girl gets teased, struggles to make friends, and flirts with resident mysterious bad boy. That's a fine set-up for a story but it's not EPIC - but the creation of this dystopian world is promising epic. In the end, it's nice scenery that doesn't amount to much. Despite the tagline, Beatrice doesn't even change all that much, not really, internally.

That nice scenery barely holds up to scrutiny, too. I can suspend disbelief and accept the premise that people have mentally simplified enough (my assumption) so that easily fit into one of five categories and don't possess any of the other qualities. The problem is that Roth doesn't stick to this. All of Beatrice's initial friends in Dauntless are transfers from other factions and because they have grown up in other factions, they do indeed possess the quality of their original faction. It's mentioned several times that Dauntless characters are annoyed with or Beatrice is surprised by the Candor-transfers' honesty/sarcasm. So clearly people DO possess multiple qualities...which destroys the premise and the finale conflict, as it's hard to believe that only Divergents are immune from mind-control. (The mind-control thing really stretched credibility, omg.)

I could go on - discussing, for example, the unlikelihood that the virus controlling every mindless Dauntless solider is stored on only one computer, making it easily destroyed - but I won't. I'll just stop and forget I ever read this book.

Jane Austen's Persuasion: Hilariously antiquated, odd ending (#34)

Be forewarned: I'm going to discuss the entire plot. Having said that, I don't think it's giving anything away - Persuasion is a classic romance, which means there's very little in the way of surprise. People fall in love, hooray! But not all that shocking.

I've only read two other Jane Austen novels - Northanger Abbey and of course Pride and Prejudice - and while I enjoyed both, I can't say that I subscribe to that particular Austen frenzy which has launched countless movies, tribute books, etc. But I've wanted to read Persuasion ever since I saw the movie The Jane Austen Book Club (based on a book; see what I mean?). They never really get around to discussing Persuasion because of an unexpected death but at one point, one of the older characters says, to paraphrase, that it's her favorite Austen book because the older heroine gets a second shot at love with a former flame. And I really liked that idea, that of an emotionally healing once all seemed lost.

And then I actually read Persuasion and found out that that "older" heroine is in fact only 27. And because Anne Elliot is so very, very ancient and was "persuaded" not to marry Captain Wentworth when she had the chance (because at the time he lacked prospect), she is of course doomed to be a spinster. "No: the years which had destroyed her youth and bloom had only given him a more glowing, manly, open look..." (40). Again, SHE'S 27! From the perspective of 2011 and with sentences like this, it was a little hard to take Persuasion seriously.

So this tragic spinsterhood is where the novel starts. Anne is the second of three sisters and the daughter of a self-absorbed widowed spendthrift; according to the good family friend Lady Russell, she is the best of the lot. Her older (and gasp! still single) sister Elizabeth is too similar to their father while younger sister Mary, though married, is too flighty. Anne on the other hand is serious, thoughtful, and grounded. Because the family is living beyond its means, they're persuaded to rent out the manor and move to the English city of Bath. Their new tenants end up being Admiral Croft and his wife, and Mrs. Croft, by chance, is the sister of Captain Wentworth. This, in addition to a number of other coincidences, is how Wentworth and Anne end up in each other's lives again.

I generally found Persuasion to be a little underdeveloped; perhaps it's not fair to compare it to Pride and Prejudice, but I thought it lacked the latter's zing and wit. (Having said that, it was published after Austen's death, so perhaps she hadn't truly finished it.) The main reason is that Anne and Captain Wentworth, the players in the novel's major love story, spend very little time together on the page. Before the novel opens, they've loved and lost one another; it's briefly mentioned that he was a "remarkably fine young man, with a great deal of intelligence, spirit, and brilliancy" and she was an "extremely pretty girl, with gentleness, modesty, taste, and feeling" (16) and those qualities, combined with a boredom arising from country life, created love. We know that Anne still loves him and regrets being "persuaded" away from him, but we never really see why on the page. We never see the love or the kind of passion necessary to make their feelings last eight years, and it's weird.

Later, when life throws them together again, they still spend very little time interacting together, despite being together all the time. People love Pride and Prejudice because of the way Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy push and pull against each other, but Anne in Persuasion spends much more time in her head, regretting past decisions and convincing herself that Wentworth's feelings are long gone. There's very little spark on the page so it's hard to see why they love each other; you're just supposed to accept that they do because they say so.

The ending cracked me up, just because it was so totally random. While we know a number of characters are sailors - including Wentworth - it's sort of a minor detail. But then Austen ends on a total tangent; she says that Anne enjoys being a sailor's wife and then concludes that sailors' manners at home might be more valuable than their national defensive importance. I was like, what? So random. I mean, I know she's been making a social commentary throughout the novel, showing the sailors all as hard-working, upstanding, self-made citizens whose demeanor is in contrast to the remaining male characters, all self-important, lazy inheritors of fortune. But Persuasion is ultimately and mainly about the reuniting of Anne and Wentworth; theme is secondary (I hope).

Overall, I enjoyed Persuasion and once I got used to the language, found it to be a quick read. It could have been stronger but I still found it entertaining. Still, if you're new to Austen, I'd probably read Pride and Prejudice first - it's a classic for a reason.

Let's take the Entertainment Weekly book quiz

I subscribe to Entertainment Weekly's Shelf Life blog on Google Reader and I noticed earlier today that they seem to have started an occasional feature called the EW Book Quiz. A book quiz - what fun! From what I could tell, they've only done three installments, with Jackie Collins, then Mindy Kaling, and most recently Gregory Maguire. The questions have been similar but not always the exact same.

I love quizzes like this - Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire springs to mind - and I thought we could play along. Leave your answers in the comments!

EW Book Quiz (with questions compiled from the three interviews):


1. What was your favorite book as a child? This is a really hard one because I had so many favorite books as a kid. But I'll have to go with a couple of Madeleine L'Engle books. I absolutely loved the Wrinkle in Time series which was full of vocabulary words I didn't know and made me feel smarter (kid-level astrophysics, yo!) and A Ring of Endless Light which convinced me that I could communicate with dolphins if I tried hard enough (and I tried once at Sea World in Orlando and felt like I was just inches of brain power away from success). My current favorite book for children is the awesome Pirate Soup.

2. What’s a book you come back to over and over? I don't usually read books more than once but I've read The Great Gatsby, Sleeping Tiger, and Eat, Pray, Love twice each because they give me the warm and fuzzies. I'm also pretty passionate about Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist and even more, The Pilgrimage, and read them when I feel the need for some serious spiritual guidance and a jumpstarting of faith that everything will be alright.

3. Is there a book you’ve never read that, for whatever reason, you’ve pretended to have read? This hasn't happened since college when I was enrolled in a Russian lit class. We were reading Anna Karenina or War and Peace (can't even remember which) and my roommate stole my copy off my shelf and gave it to her best friend. When I went looking for it, she confessed but was pretty mean about it, saying that I wasn't using it so it was hers for the taking. So I had to pretend I was going to read it so that thieving bitch would give me my property back. Still haven't read either of them though War and Peace is on my revised list for the remainder of this year.

4. What’s a classic or much-hyped book that you’ve never quite understood the merits of? The Scarlet Letter, The Crucible, and The Stranger. Omg how I hate those books. Even worse, because I changed high schools, I had to read The Scarlet Letter twice and The Stranger three times, absolute torture. As for modern-day books, pretty much any Oprah selection fits the bill.

5. What is a book you would kill a bug with? Seems like Atlas Shrugged would be big enough to kill a mouse even.

6. What’s a favorite book that you’ve read for school? It's not a favorite per se but Julio Cortazar's freaky short story "Axolotl" has stayed with me since I read it in a college Spanish class. It's about a man who has a special moment with a salamander. I also gained a newfound appreciation for the merits of Dracula in a feminist Gothic lit class.

7. Which fictional character do you most identify with? I really have no answer for this; I don't usually connect with characteers this way. I like them often but I never feel like they're me - except maybe for Vicky Austen, the dolphin-loving heroine mentioned above.

Now it's your turn!

The Paris Wife: Another passive protagonist (#33)

I finished Paula McLain's The Paris Wife about three weeks ago but it was kind of a miracle as I was seriously tempted to put it down around page 120. And it makes me sad - I'm fairly passionate about Hemingway (I love the books that I love and absolutely detest the ones I detest = passion, no?) and I really wanted to love this book. But guess what? The protagonist is yet another f*ing wallflower! Pray tell, what is the sudden fascination with this kind of ho-hum character?

The protagonist is 28-year-old Hadley Richardson, a passive female well on her way to spinsterhood who ends up - miracle upon miracle! - catching the eye of  a young, charming Ernest Hemingway in Chicago. Even though he's only 20, he already seems to be pretty passionate - he has wild dreams of writerly success, unexpected and dramatic fallings-out with friends, and a bevy of female admirers - and even though a friend warns Hadley against the union, she marries him anyway. He soon sprits her off to Europe and she goes along for the ride - both literally and figuratively. As portrayed in The Paris Wife, Hadley has zero personality and zero ambitions for herself. I get that she's supposed to be the steady rock which allows him to climb to greatness during their six-year union but omg, if she doesn't make for fiction's most incredibly boring martyr.

This book has gotten a ton of buzz which I find a little surprising - especially because the reviews aren't unanimous in their praise. While The Paris Wife does currently have 162 five-star reviews on Amazon, it also has 70 reviews of varying stars that thrash it (plus another 78 four-star reviews which are decidedly mixed). The New York Times essentially made fun of it, calling Hadley a "stodgy bore" and calls McLain's use of research "confounding."

The Paris Wife was boring, and in my opinion, it had a lot to do with the author's style choices. Yes, Hadley herself was boring. But McLain amplified that in trying, I strongly suspect, to write like Hemingway in "short, declarative sentences." The biggest issue in the novel was that reactions were never described, making it really difficult to emotionally connect with any of the characters or the situations. For example, there are multiple instances when Ernest and Hadley find themselves at a bar in Europe with lively friends and acquaintances, a situation which always seemed to include a few lovely ladies. And invariably, Ernest would end up in close conversation with one of them, but nobody's facial expressions or tones of voice or reactions would be described. Isn't body language supposed to make up like 90 percent of communication? It made for a really hollow book - you never knew if Ernest was innocently flirting, having a serious conversation, or making a move; you never knew if Hadley felt betrayed or naively didn't notice. This happened throughout the novel, this lack of emotional explanation, and and as a result, it was really hard to become attached to either of them or what they would struggle with as their relationship changed.

State of Wonder: Oh, to be in the Amazon...

I finished Ann Patchett's State of Wonder at the beginning of October and while I was a little disappointed by the inconclusive ending, I thoroughly enjoyed the journey and would absolutely recommend this novel. I've never read anything by her before though I know people loved Bel Canto so it's yet another book I may have to add to my 2012 reading list. (The year hasn't started yet and already my book list is way, way too long...)

In order to talk about the ending, I'll have to thoroughly talk about the plot so don't read any further if you don't want to know what happens. In fact, if you're planning on reading the book, you should probably stop now - the discovery of what's happened and why is an important element of the book's emotional journey and I think it would lessen the book's "wonder" to know what will happen.

So, with that out of the way...State of Wonder is the story of Marina Singh, a failed OBGYN with daddy issues who now works as a laboratory researcher for a large pharmaceutical firm. She has a good working relationship with her lab partner, family man Anders Eckman, and is having an affair with the head of the company, Mr. Fox (who she always calls Mr. Fox up until the last third of the book, even though she hopes he's already kinda-sorta proposed). Like some other protagonists we've discussed in recent posts, Marina is pretty darn passive about her life at the outset of the novel. She’s a researcher at Vogel because of an accident in medical school (where she felt like she didn’t live up to her teacher’s expectations), her father abandoned her as a child and left her with nightmares, and of course she refers to her secret lover "mister." Marina is a waiter, someone waiting for something to happen in her life, and until then she's just going to plod along.

So we learn all this about Marina as Anders get sent to the Amazon to check up on an expensive but mysterious project that Vogel is funding. It turns out that Marina's former teacher, Dr. Annick Swenson, believes she has found a way to stop menopause, naturally extending a woman's fertility, but she's kind of a strongwilled rebel who demands total secrecy and no limitations on her research. When a letter arrives saying that Anders has unexpectedly died, Marina gets sent to Brazil – ostensibly to pick up where he left off but really to find out what happened to him for his wife and kids. In some ways, this is where the novel starts, but she doesn't find Dr. Swenson in Manaus until page 97 (on my Nook, anyway) - it was quite a delay but it was interesting and I felt like I was on the journey with Marina.

At this point, Annick takes Marina into the jungle to the research station, set among the Lakashi tribe, who it turns out is eating forest bark. She gradually becomes a part of the research group and eventually becomes Dr. Swenson's heir apparent. She's admitted to the circle of trust only to discover that altogether different things are going on - for Dr. Swenson, very little besides science matters and anything that gets in the way of that is worth covering up. As a result, Marina is faced with some difficult moral choices.


But there is where my disappointment set in. There are some really interesting questions posed - and a lot of time spent building up to them - but aside from deliberately rescuing Anders (and the trade-off that takes, plus the odd decision later that night), I didn't think it was clear what Marina would choose to do. It seems like she'd changed...but how? Would Marina return to Brazil to continue Dr. Swenson's work or rat her out? What would she do about Mr. Fox...and did she even love him anyway? I don't think there was even enough to make an educated guess, making it such a strange, unresolved book that needed much more at the end.

Many, many people have compared State of Wonder to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which obviously makes sense, but in the book, when Marina is at the glorious opera house in Manaus, she compares herself to Orpheus and Anders to Eurydice. And it's probably a more apt description - while Marina is going on her own internal journey to face her demons, she is primarily going to rescue Anders from death (by ostensibly finding out what happened to him) and only encounters her own demons along the way.

Personally, I thought the Amazon sounded amazing, deadly creatures and all, and have now resolved to move it higher on my travel wish list. Apparently Ann Patchett didn't feel the same - in an Amazon.com interview between her and Elizabeth Gilbert, she says that she kinda hated the Amazon when she went there to do research. "I absolutely loved the Amazon for four days. It was gorgeous and unfamiliar and deeply fascinating. Unfortunately, I stayed there for ten days. There are a lot of insects in the Amazon, a lot of mud, surprisingly few vegetables, too many snakes... I can see how great it would be for a very short visit, and how great it would be if you lived there and had figured out what was and wasn’t going to kill you, but the interim length of time isn’t great." I don't know why this cracks me up but it does - I guess I'm tickled she wrote an entire novel about the Amazon while hating the Amazon.

Painted Ladies: Alas, not Robert B. Parker's best (#31)

I've always enjoyed dipping into Robert B. Parker's crime novels - it's not usually my genre but I enjoy his humor, and over the years I've let the books find me. (Although I haven't read one since 2006; apparently the path can be long and twisty.) I noticed this one of the library's website and checked it out on a whim, intrigued by the premise - yet again - of an art mystery. It was kind of amazing how much this one mirrored Daniel Silva's The Rembrandt Affair, which I had read only two months before.

But I wasn't a big fan of Painted Ladies unfortunately - which seems disrespectful, considering that he died in January 2010 before this novel was published. (His last book, however, appears to be Sixkill.) Publishers Weekly called it "lackluster," which is an apt description. Painted Ladies was missing both Parker's usual zing and a complex and/or thrilling plot.

The plot centers around the death of art historian and professor Ashton Prince who Spenser agrees to protect during the recovery of a fictitious Dutch painting called "Lady with a Finch." But things go awry and Prince dies and the painting gets incinerated - which Spenser won't tolerate under his watch. So Spenser decides to figure it out, making it his own personal mission. And like the painting in The Rembrandt Affair, "Lady with a Finch" turns out to have a sordid history, having also been confiscated from a wealthy Dutch family during the Holocaust. (Even the families have similar names: Herzberg here and Herzfeld there.) In the present day, Spenser tries to charm - both successfully and unsuccessfully - a mother, daughter, and a mysterious art foundation.

But it never felt suspenseful; the links were just too easy. There was also one major inconsistency, which I was really surprised that the editor or copyeditor didn't catch: On p. 177, Winifred goes from being a certain someone's ex-girlfriend to being his ex-wife for the rest of the book. And while that seems minor, about 20 pages before, another character made a huge deal of the fact that they were never married, saying, "Fact is, for crissake, she was shacking up with some guy who had no intention of marrying her, and when she got knocked up, he left" (p. 152). It really stuck out to me.

So all in all, not my favorite of the four Robert B. Parker books that I've read. But as I was perusing the Amazon reviews (most people seemed to like Painted Ladies for sentimental reasons), I saw many mentions of his highly praised first novel The Godwulf Manuscript which I will add to my booklist for next year.

What is a book?

As I previously blogged about, I've already reached my goal of reading 30 books this year - or did I? I feel genuinely conflicted. If I count literally every book I finished, I'm currently on #34...but if I start getting picky, I'm only on #27.

The problem is those damn Sweet Valley High books that I read in June, that bubblegum for the brain. Should they count? That is the question. Obviously, they are actual books, as thin and shallow as they might be. But I feel guilty counting them, like I'm gaming the system - because if I just read books like that, I could probably read 300 books a year, at least. And in fairness, in other years, young-adult novels have pumped up my tally.

I also read Blake Snyder's awesome screenwriting book Save the Cat at the end of May (though I didn't blog about it - hence the missing #15). I counted that too - but should I? It was a real book but pretty focused on how-to. I also debated whether or not to count the Genesis and Exodus, which I read with my students - I decided not to include them individually but instead bundled them with Robert Alter's Genesis commentary, which I read every word of.

At the end of the day, this debate matters little as this list is only for me, myself and I. I don't begrudge others their 100 books a year and the junk lit it takes to get there - to each his own reading experience. But this has really made me think again about what I read and why I started keeping track in the first place. I guess to me, when I say I want to read 30 books, I mean I really want to read 30 pieces of literature. That's why I feel icky about the Sweet Valley High books and unsure about the Bible or Save the Cat. They're books (duh) but not the kind of books that I'm trying to motivate myself to read.

Author Laura Fraser tackled these same questions on her website; she said that writing down her books read has made her much more picky, as it brings home the truth that there are only so many books you can read in a lifetime. At the time when I read that (all of two weeks ago), I said that my list hasn't kept me from reading crap but I've been thinking about this quite a bit since then.

The truth is, I don't want to read Sweet Valley High and crappy chick-lit (though it can make for some fun posts!). So I've regrouped and really looked at what I'd like to read in the remaining weeks of the year. My original list had 18 books on it. After a good think, I narrowed it down to the following nine +, a goodly feat in itself: Persuasion, The Iliad, The War That Killed Achilles, Bossypants, Divergent, Brothers Karamazov or War and Peace, The Submission, A Farewell to Arms and the Game of Thrones series.

I also decided to split the difference on my book list and will consider the year a reading success at 35 books total. Which is pretty much a given at this point - huzzah! - since Persuasion is #34 and I'm about 30 pages from the end at the beginning of November.

This Charming Man: Otherwise known as book #30!

Yes, it's true...I have reached book 30 for the year. Huzzah! In fact, it happened at the end of August which should tell you something about my blogging efforts (though I've been getting better - have you noticed?).

I picked up This Charming Man, by Marian Keyes, when I was in Italy. Even though this particular edition was enormous, I still couldn't resist - her books are generally light and fluffy but loveable. I have been carrying around a soft spot for Angels for years. This Charming Man centers around popular Irish politican Paddy de Courcy and the four women who have been most affected by him. The novel starts with Lola, completely crushed as she learns that Paddy is getting married - because she's his girlfriend but not the fiancee. It then turns to Grace, a journalist, and Marnie, her alcoholic sister, who knew Paddy as teenagers. Lastly is Alicia, Paddy's surprise fiancee, who has an odd role as a wallflower (and as it turns out later, a backstabber). Each woman has her own section in the book as we see their life and Paddy's effect, either past or present on that, until they come together as a group near the end.

This book was a little darker than the other Keyes' books I've read. To the world, Paddy is a JFK-like figure but it turns out that he's conniving, selfish and abusive, and has done some serious psychic damage to these ladies. There's a really delicate balance that has to be made between chick-lit lightness and topical seriousness but overall, I thought she did it well, and I ended up giving the book to my mom to read.