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A review by glyptodonsneeze
The Rain Before it Falls by Jonathan Coe
3.0
Conversation with my lesbian friend:
Me: "I'm reading a book about a lesbian but it's boring."
Her: "Was it written by a man?"
Me: "Yup."
Jonathan Coe's The Rotters' Club was brilliant and I was excited to read another one of his, but I'm wondering if he pulled off a stunning novel that defines an era because it rests in his lived experience; but The Rain Before It Falls, with its female protagonists, falls flat because Coe can't imagine that being a lesbian, or a woman, is all that interesting. The women in Rotters' Club (girl that the main kid has a crush on, her sister, his sister, the mom) are all portrayed in relation to the novel's men. So is The Rain Before It Falls boring because Coe thinks women are boring? Soft? That their lives are an expression of their relationships to others and banal, undefined feelings, and a sort of existential yearning that can only be fixed with penises? Maybe he does women better in other books. I don't know. I'll probably find out later, but I'm reading about the fur trade next.
Gill's aunt Rosamond dies and leaves four cassette tapes and clear instructions that they be given to a person named Imogen that Gill met once at a family party in the '80s. Unable to find Imogen, Gill listens to the tapes herself and hears the tragic story of three generations of Rosamond's aunt's (Gill's great aunt's) family and Imogen herself. My main problem with this book is with the narrative device. The most erudite person in the world doesn't talk into a tape recorder this way. Rosamond would make it clear that she was describing a photograph into a microphone and begin speaking in the voice of a novel written in the third person, Jonathan Coe. Had there been a line, "Imogen, I wrote this history of your family and am reading it into a tape recorder because you're blind," or if Rosamond just spoke extemporaneously like a person talking into a tape recorder, this book would have been much more plausible. Beyond that, Rosamond's story is reasonably sad, her cousin Beatrix's story is quite sad, her niece Thea's story is unbearably sad, and Imogen's story is tragic beyond all imagining, but the framing devices* temper the drama and make the story dry.
*Beatrix, Thea, and Imogen's story is mediated by Rosamond, who is mediating things through a narrow narrative device of describing photographs into a tape recorder, and all this is mediated by Gill, who's kind of boring.
Me: "I'm reading a book about a lesbian but it's boring."
Her: "Was it written by a man?"
Me: "Yup."
Jonathan Coe's The Rotters' Club was brilliant and I was excited to read another one of his, but I'm wondering if he pulled off a stunning novel that defines an era because it rests in his lived experience; but The Rain Before It Falls, with its female protagonists, falls flat because Coe can't imagine that being a lesbian, or a woman, is all that interesting. The women in Rotters' Club (girl that the main kid has a crush on, her sister, his sister, the mom) are all portrayed in relation to the novel's men. So is The Rain Before It Falls boring because Coe thinks women are boring? Soft? That their lives are an expression of their relationships to others and banal, undefined feelings, and a sort of existential yearning that can only be fixed with penises? Maybe he does women better in other books. I don't know. I'll probably find out later, but I'm reading about the fur trade next.
Gill's aunt Rosamond dies and leaves four cassette tapes and clear instructions that they be given to a person named Imogen that Gill met once at a family party in the '80s. Unable to find Imogen, Gill listens to the tapes herself and hears the tragic story of three generations of Rosamond's aunt's (Gill's great aunt's) family and Imogen herself. My main problem with this book is with the narrative device. The most erudite person in the world doesn't talk into a tape recorder this way. Rosamond would make it clear that she was describing a photograph into a microphone and begin speaking in the voice of a novel written in the third person, Jonathan Coe. Had there been a line, "Imogen, I wrote this history of your family and am reading it into a tape recorder because you're blind," or if Rosamond just spoke extemporaneously like a person talking into a tape recorder, this book would have been much more plausible. Beyond that, Rosamond's story is reasonably sad, her cousin Beatrix's story is quite sad, her niece Thea's story is unbearably sad, and Imogen's story is tragic beyond all imagining, but the framing devices* temper the drama and make the story dry.
*Beatrix, Thea, and Imogen's story is mediated by Rosamond, who is mediating things through a narrow narrative device of describing photographs into a tape recorder, and all this is mediated by Gill, who's kind of boring.