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A review by ben_miller
The Descendants by Kaui Hart Hemmings
5.0
Five stars for this cleanly written, viciously funny, heartbreaking novel. Zero stars for the tiresome readers who found the characters "unlikable" or "unsympathetic." They're wrong, and more importantly, missing the point, and even MORE importantly, they are irritating me, personally.
-~*~-
This would be a great novel to teach in a college fiction-writing seminar. It uses a bunch of middle-of-the-road modern fiction techniques that would be easy, but illuminating, to analyze. To give one example, every new character that Matt King (our narrator) encounters is already in the middle of something—in other words, living a life that our story is interrupting. Nobody's waiting on the next page for the story to get to them so they can play their part. Matt King and his problems are an inconvenience to pretty much everybody, especially himself. This is a basic concept/technique that is surprisingly difficult to put into practice, and Hemmings does it beautifully.
It would also be a great platform for talking to students about why the "unlikable/unsympathetic/unrelatable" conversation that many people are fixated on is so toxic and aggravating. I happen to find these characters very sympathetic and relatable—they're flawed, damaged, difficult; they try and they fail; they repeat mistakes and fall into old bad habits. If that doesn't remind you of you or someone you care about, you're probably kidding yourself.
But even if you don't "relate" to the King family—and in fairness I'm relieved that my family is more functional than this (not to jinx it)—the point of reading fiction is to inhabit other lives. You don't have to like what you find there, but it's not a valid criticism of the book itself. I have disliked books in which I found the characters repellent or annoying, but I also recognize that the problem is rooted somewhere else, either in a prejudice or stylistic preference on my part, or some other artistic failing on the book's part. If we lead with "I can't sympathize with these people," there's nowhere else to go. We can't learn anything. But if we can make it about why the book failed to keep you invested, or why your biases made you shut down, at least there's a conversation to have.
Okay, rant over. I read half of this book on the plane to Maui and the other half before breakfast the next morning. (Jetlag.) I found it weirdly thrilling—I laughed out loud, my pulse rose perceptibly at multiple points, I got misty—not sure what else I could ask a book to do. I guess this should serve as a reminder to me that I can go looking for those reactions in murder mysteries, fantasies, comedies, etc, but actually—nothing tops the regular old human story done well.
-~*~-
This would be a great novel to teach in a college fiction-writing seminar. It uses a bunch of middle-of-the-road modern fiction techniques that would be easy, but illuminating, to analyze. To give one example, every new character that Matt King (our narrator) encounters is already in the middle of something—in other words, living a life that our story is interrupting. Nobody's waiting on the next page for the story to get to them so they can play their part. Matt King and his problems are an inconvenience to pretty much everybody, especially himself. This is a basic concept/technique that is surprisingly difficult to put into practice, and Hemmings does it beautifully.
It would also be a great platform for talking to students about why the "unlikable/unsympathetic/unrelatable" conversation that many people are fixated on is so toxic and aggravating. I happen to find these characters very sympathetic and relatable—they're flawed, damaged, difficult; they try and they fail; they repeat mistakes and fall into old bad habits. If that doesn't remind you of you or someone you care about, you're probably kidding yourself.
But even if you don't "relate" to the King family—and in fairness I'm relieved that my family is more functional than this (not to jinx it)—the point of reading fiction is to inhabit other lives. You don't have to like what you find there, but it's not a valid criticism of the book itself. I have disliked books in which I found the characters repellent or annoying, but I also recognize that the problem is rooted somewhere else, either in a prejudice or stylistic preference on my part, or some other artistic failing on the book's part. If we lead with "I can't sympathize with these people," there's nowhere else to go. We can't learn anything. But if we can make it about why the book failed to keep you invested, or why your biases made you shut down, at least there's a conversation to have.
Okay, rant over. I read half of this book on the plane to Maui and the other half before breakfast the next morning. (Jetlag.) I found it weirdly thrilling—I laughed out loud, my pulse rose perceptibly at multiple points, I got misty—not sure what else I could ask a book to do. I guess this should serve as a reminder to me that I can go looking for those reactions in murder mysteries, fantasies, comedies, etc, but actually—nothing tops the regular old human story done well.