the underside of joy

“Is this ‘chick lit’?”, Pat Nolan asked me when I spoke about the Underside book on our radio program.  I have recently been reading a spate of novels by authors sited in western Sonoma County.  I thought for a few seconds, then said, “No! It’s no different than Didion’s recent book about her adopted daughter.  Relationships are not the sole purview of the female gender.”  Obviously he thought they were.  “She was self-indulgent the first 50 pages, and I put it aside for a month.  But then I started in again, and the following 250 pages were interesting, balanced, and altogether, a good read.”  The author of the underside of joy, Seré Prince Halverson, mentions Sonoma County as where she is living, but does not make this a central plotline as the other local writers have done.  The variant on the theme is that the protagonist is the step-mom, dealing with the return of the birth mother for shared rights of the kids.

 

By comparison, another book I’m currently reading, I will also put aside after 100 of its 400 pages.  This is letter from a stranger by Barbara Taylor Bradford.  Bradford’s book, stranger, is the epitome of what men mean when they say, ‘chic lit’.  It’s a “Dallas” style soap opera put into novel format. 

Justine, an evocative middle-eastern name, is a world-famous documentary film-maker, wealthy, but noble.  She has a twin brother, a world-famous architect and also a brilliant artist; well, she is too, come to mention it.  Justine intercepts a letter addressed to her mother, off on her annual world tour.  She nosily reads the letter and surmises that her 80 year-old grandmother is alive and living in Istanbul.  She freaks out as she and her brother overly-dramatize this news and decide to drop everything, [his opening of a boutique hotel in London; her four-part special on CNN,] and go to Istanbul to find granny.

Now I have come to love books about Istanbul – it seems to be the new Berlin as far as the hot ‘in’ cities to explore.  I’ve ordered Istanbul Passage, which combines spycraft with Istanbul intrigue – can’t wait. 

So, I may pick this stranger book up again.  But I have peeked ahead and the singular focus of the writer on the protagonist’s “me! me! me!” outlook is hard to get through, even with the reward of a travelogue about Istanbul.  Thus the components I like to avoid are: a predictable plotline (and thus vapid); one-dimensional support characters; moral depravity focusing on lavish wealth and fame; and too much stream of consciousness thought without any introspection.  That’s bad lit.