A review by pidgevorg
The Dive from Clausen's Pier by Ann Packer

2.0

I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, the author's style is very smooth and readable, and her character portrayals are very true to life. But on the other hand, the story and characters are unoriginal. The main characters, Carie, Kilroy and Mike, in particular come off as complete non-entities, with nothing unique about them whatsoever, other than the fact that they suffered a personal tragedy. They may embody different “types”--for example, the naive midwesterner vs the “urban snob”--but these are types we've all seen before both in life and in fiction, and nothing new or insightful is being said about them here. It might be unfair to the author to say this, because after all she portrayed the characters brilliantly. But the fact remains that what is being portrayed is a group of people who are completely mediocre and have no depths of character. In a novel like this one, which relies on people rather than plot, character development is critical, and you might even say that this book technically has it. But it all boils down to this: the characters make some half-hearted attempts to transcend their situation, but quickly give up and embrace their moral, mental, and artistic mediocrity. Once again, this might be true to life, but this is a novel, not a sociology textbook. In the end, I was left with a big, bored “so what?”