claire_fuller_writer's reviews
1030 reviews

This was my first read of John Updike. Everyone who heard that I was reading it said that they'd read it when they were a teenager, and all they remembered was how 'saucy' it was. And it is, there's quite a bit of literary sex, and philandering. I did really enjoy the writing, Updike's amazing use of language to describe places and people, but it's also a very dense book, sometimes so heavy going, so full to the brim with language, that I wanted to get to the end, and now I feel the need for something lighter and shorter. I sometimes had some problems with how articulate and emotionally intelligent every single character was, but then I would forgive Updike this because it allowed his wonderful writing to just flow through my brain. The ending was also odd, just a quick summing up of all ten main over two pages, as if even Updike had had enough of them.

I know I'm in a tiny minority here, but I just don't get why people love this. I must be missing something, but I just didn't get into the characters, the location, the story. It felt like a teenage diary. I'm not going to go on about what I didn't like because, well, because you might be one of the people who love it.
(Maybe it suffered because I read it straight after Couples by Updike, which is so full of language, and this felt so bereft of it.)

I love how Annemarie Neary writes. When I read her writing it doesn't feel like I'm reading, I'm just there. This is the story of a mother's disappearance and how her two adult children are coping with the reality that they never really knew her or what happened to her. Jess has barricaded herself against hurt with a child, husband, nice house and all consuming job. Her brother, Ro, has spent his life searching obsessively for his mother. Ro's behaviour becomes more manic, and Jess's life splits apart when a passport that their mother may have used comes to light. The characters are really well developed, the location was beautifully described. At the very end it was maybe a little neatly tied up for me, but I know a lot of readers like that.

I was warned that this is an odd book. I got nearly to the end and kept thinking, well, it's a little odd (a help group for people who have heard voices meets in an out of season motel in Maine), but still interesting (a woman is hiding with her daughter from her megalomaniac husband in the motel), and then last night I read the final few pages and it does get very odd. I haven't quite worked out if it is good odd, or just weird odd. I'm worrying that it's the latter.
(And aside from the ending I didn't feel the hearing voices narrative was strong enough - why do the people still need to meet when they no longer hear the voices? And how does hearing the voices link with the other part of the story?)

I didn't love this as much as Commonwealth, but did love it more than Bel Canto. I really enjoyed being in the Amazonian rainforest with all the insects and the Lakashi, and I love Patchett's writing. My only trouble with it was that the first three quarters were beautifully drawn out, while towards the end things seemed to happen for the sake of the plot rather than the novel. But it was still a good read.