In the meantime I did finish a book: Hilma Wollitzer's Summer Reading. Unfortunately, it was disappointing. I'm not linking to it, I'm not even devoting much thought or writing to it. It was 200 and some pages of vanilla. The plot was so pointless and not in the Robert Altman's The Company/Tom Perotta's Little Children kind of way. It wasn't a tastefully framed snapshot of life, though that's clearly what it tried to be. There were supposed to be revelations and I didn't feel that any were particularly momentous, though I largely attribute that to the fact that I never became invested enough in the lives of the characters to really care if someone was hiding a case of dyslexia (yes, that's the burning secret... a Hamptons bookclubber with dyslexia).
Her writing was good in terms of structure and description, but I guess part of writing is plot, so that leaves me back at my original point that this book was weak. I'm all for the artistically minimalist plot, but not when you're characters aren't particularly real and the plot is so bleh. It was neither realistic nor unrealistic, it was neither uncompelling nor compelling. Wollitzer needs to go back to the drawing board. When you're an author, I consider the drawing board to be reading. Wollitzer needs to look at what makes a magnetic character. I mean, it's not easy to construct a person out of words. I'm not dumbing down the difficulty of the task. I guess I just expected better.
So I'm moving on to some great literature. In some vast oversight in my education, I was never forced to read Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. So I'm reading it now. My friends are divided. Some have responded with, "Oh, that's a great book." Others have merely grimaced. I hope that reading it by choice and at my leisure will allow me to a appreciate it more than if I was memorizing irrelevant details while dreading the inevitable multiple choice quiz of high school English class. Anyone out there ever read The Grapes of Wrath? Thoughts?
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