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A quiet story. Its tone feels like a lot of Japanese literature. It is an interesting choice on Washington's part. It makes you work hard to dig down into the characters. Lazy readers would likely see sad and disconnected characters but really that is not the case at all. This is a character study about two people so dinged up they are afraid to feel too much and also so afraid to be their fathers that they are paralyzed when it comes to defining themselves as adults. That fear of feeling extends to the secondary characters as well.
I was gratified by a book that gave us characters we don't often see in litfic - economically lower middle class, not college educated, and not striving to change either of those things. It also presents certain characteristics that are often a BIG DEAL in literature with no muss or fuss. The central couple are of different races and countries of origin, and that is not really a thing, there are people with substance abuse issues, and while those issues have ripple effects, we don't have to analyze the disease itself,. It was refreshing.
The one significant negative for me (if I could I would have rated this a 3.5) was the relationship between Ben and Mike. I liked them individually, but i would have liked to have some reason to want to preserve their relationship. It was hard to see what was there to hang on to, and it felt clear that they would both easily survive the breakup, and would likely be the better for it. I was sadder to think that Ben and Mitsuko (Mike's mother) would be separated than Ben and Mike would be. The most compelling relationships by far were between Ben and Mitsuoko and Mike and Eiju and I am not sure that is what Washington intended.
Overall a lovely quiet read with real resonance. I need to mention that I find people's obsession with the lack of quotation marks odd. Not using quotation marks gives encounters a more natural vivacity, and also more closely aligns prose with poetry. I have no problem with quotation marks, but I also get that they, like all punctuation, are a choice -- a way to set a tone, establish authorial voice, and define the relationship between the story and the reader. This is not something Sally Rooney invented, so stop with that shit. James Joyce was eschewing quotation marks before Sally Rooney's parents were born. Established current writers like Cormac McCarthy, Junot Diaz and Louise Erdrich do the same. If you can't figure out that people are having a conversation without quotations marks either you have a bad writer on your hands, or you are a bad reader.
I was gratified by a book that gave us characters we don't often see in litfic - economically lower middle class, not college educated, and not striving to change either of those things. It also presents certain characteristics that are often a BIG DEAL in literature with no muss or fuss. The central couple are of different races and countries of origin, and that is not really a thing, there are people with substance abuse issues, and while those issues have ripple effects, we don't have to analyze the disease itself,
Spoiler
there is a character in the book who is HIV positive, and while that status impacts their actions and their thoughts about relationships, it is not something the author primarily focuses onThe one significant negative for me (if I could I would have rated this a 3.5) was the relationship between Ben and Mike. I liked them individually, but i would have liked to have some reason to want to preserve their relationship. It was hard to see what was there to hang on to, and it felt clear that they would both easily survive the breakup, and would likely be the better for it. I was sadder to think that Ben and Mitsuko (Mike's mother) would be separated than Ben and Mike would be. The most compelling relationships by far were between Ben and Mitsuoko and Mike and Eiju and I am not sure that is what Washington intended.
Overall a lovely quiet read with real resonance. I need to mention that I find people's obsession with the lack of quotation marks odd. Not using quotation marks gives encounters a more natural vivacity, and also more closely aligns prose with poetry. I have no problem with quotation marks, but I also get that they, like all punctuation, are a choice -- a way to set a tone, establish authorial voice, and define the relationship between the story and the reader. This is not something Sally Rooney invented, so stop with that shit. James Joyce was eschewing quotation marks before Sally Rooney's parents were born. Established current writers like Cormac McCarthy, Junot Diaz and Louise Erdrich do the same. If you can't figure out that people are having a conversation without quotations marks either you have a bad writer on your hands, or you are a bad reader.