The road to a bad novel is paved with good intentions. Nine times out of ten, when a novelist wants to do me good, or inspire me, or teach me, I end up hating the book. I won't rule out the possibility that I am just a nasty, negative person, but I will go out on a limb with this book and say it's not me, it's Kris Radish. This novel is bad.
The premise is cute: Annie Freeman, who dies of cancer, asks a group of her women friends to scatter her ashes in various American locales that held special meaning for her. None of these women know each other, but while on the trip, they bond with each other based on their love for Annie. Each of them is inspired to change her life for the better, based on Annie's wisdom and example.
Annie is incredibly wise, dynamic, funny, altruistic, intelligent, loving. So we are told, over and over and over again. But we never meet Annie in flashback. The author does not give us a chance to form our own opinion of Annie. We are simply told how wonderful she is, and how wonderful her friends are, and how all the strangers they meet along the way are astounded by their love and their womanly womanness. It gets very tedious very fast.
The women on the funeral trip all sound alike, except for the one woman with a penchant for scatological slang. Their conversation reads like a transcript from a feminist group-therapy session: "'I feel ready to open up the boundaries of my own world,' Balinda confesses." These women continually profess their love for Annie and for each other, in a highly romanticized depiction of female relationships, but we never feel what they feel.
My library has a nice section of "how to write" manuals, and I'm sure most of them include some variation of the old advice, "show, don't tell." This novel is a perfect - negative - example for that advice.
Working as a novelist is absolutely a regular job
Posted by: LambertoGreco7 | 01/24/2010 at 03:50 PM