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sterling8 's review for:
A Sudden Light
by Garth Stein
While I really enjoyed The Art of Racing in the Rain, I don't think that lightning struck twice for this author with this book.
What's the book about? It's a ghost story,it's a man's story, it's environmentalism,it's Jane Eyre. And what do I mean by all this?
It's a ghost story. It seems that lately there are lots of books around that are trying to update the gothic, and here it's done in the Pacific Northwest. Riddell House (yes, it's that obvious) was built over one hundred years ago, and it has secrets, and it has ghosts.
The environmentalism was actually my favorite part of the book. We get to read about young men climbing as high as they can into the tops of tall trees for the joy of it. The author harkens back to John Muir and his love of nature, and I think he's quite effective at it. He's done his historical homework about the timber industry and the legacy of environmentalists past, and I think I would have liked the book just fine if we'd kept to that.
But it's also a man's story, told in a weirdly inconsistent tone. We go from modern colloquialism to stilted formality and back again in the writing style, and I just can't quite figure out what the author was going for there. It's almost like the narrator just dreamt of Manderly again, but then suddenly he hits his head-pow!- on a beam. The more distant tone seems kind of prissy and overly sentimental, and I preferred the more informal voice which sometimes popped up. What else do I mean by a man's story? This is a book populated by men. We have an absent mother who we learn about through the occasional phone call. We have the narrator's dead grandmother, who may or may not appear and dance in a ghostly fashion in Riddell House's dusty abandoned ballroom. And we have Simply Serena, the narrator's aunt.
And Serena was simply the biggest problem I've got with the book. Spoilers follow:
Serena- what the hell kind of character was she supposed to be? She was Rebecca, she was Mr. Rochester, she was a child, a siren, a victim. As the only female who made a physical appearance in the book, she was a sad disappointment. She tries to vamp our teenage narrator, she's in love with her brother, she gaslights her dad, she's every dangerous woman wielding sexuality as a weapon you've ever read about. And why? This was what I could not get. Yes, her mother died young. Yes, her brother then left for school immediately. Yes, she's a caretaker for her father. But what broke her so utterly? I guess it doesn't matter. When it comes down to it, she's the madwoman in the attic who makes the plot run, and it doesn't really matter why- women be crazy, amirite?
Also, apropos of nothing: Serena had blue nail polish on her toes. We sure hear about that a lot. And in the early nineties, when the book is set, highly unlikely. Fashions were for brights reds and pinks, fading into neutrals, back then. The current trend for funky nail polish was not around yet. It reminded me of the whole "scrunchy" thing with Sex and the City (you either know what I mean by this, or don't need to bother finding out- no big thing).
So, no female characters with agency who weren't also crazy because plot, a haunted house burned down in the end by a madwoman, a narrator sadly looking back upon his tragic youth. Frankly, I didn't need any of that plot. I wanted to hear more about Ben and Harry, the young men who had fallen in love but who were caught in a society that didn't acknowledge their love and a family who expected a dynasty to continue. I wanted to read about their adventures in the forest, their love of building something beautiful, and their hope of preserving what was best about the land. But this wasn't that book.
What's the book about? It's a ghost story,it's a man's story, it's environmentalism,it's Jane Eyre. And what do I mean by all this?
It's a ghost story. It seems that lately there are lots of books around that are trying to update the gothic, and here it's done in the Pacific Northwest. Riddell House (yes, it's that obvious) was built over one hundred years ago, and it has secrets, and it has ghosts.
The environmentalism was actually my favorite part of the book. We get to read about young men climbing as high as they can into the tops of tall trees for the joy of it. The author harkens back to John Muir and his love of nature, and I think he's quite effective at it. He's done his historical homework about the timber industry and the legacy of environmentalists past, and I think I would have liked the book just fine if we'd kept to that.
But it's also a man's story, told in a weirdly inconsistent tone. We go from modern colloquialism to stilted formality and back again in the writing style, and I just can't quite figure out what the author was going for there. It's almost like the narrator just dreamt of Manderly again, but then suddenly he hits his head-pow!- on a beam. The more distant tone seems kind of prissy and overly sentimental, and I preferred the more informal voice which sometimes popped up. What else do I mean by a man's story? This is a book populated by men. We have an absent mother who we learn about through the occasional phone call. We have the narrator's dead grandmother, who may or may not appear and dance in a ghostly fashion in Riddell House's dusty abandoned ballroom. And we have Simply Serena, the narrator's aunt.
And Serena was simply the biggest problem I've got with the book. Spoilers follow:
Serena- what the hell kind of character was she supposed to be? She was Rebecca, she was Mr. Rochester, she was a child, a siren, a victim. As the only female who made a physical appearance in the book, she was a sad disappointment. She tries to vamp our teenage narrator, she's in love with her brother, she gaslights her dad, she's every dangerous woman wielding sexuality as a weapon you've ever read about. And why? This was what I could not get. Yes, her mother died young. Yes, her brother then left for school immediately. Yes, she's a caretaker for her father. But what broke her so utterly? I guess it doesn't matter. When it comes down to it, she's the madwoman in the attic who makes the plot run, and it doesn't really matter why- women be crazy, amirite?
Also, apropos of nothing: Serena had blue nail polish on her toes. We sure hear about that a lot. And in the early nineties, when the book is set, highly unlikely. Fashions were for brights reds and pinks, fading into neutrals, back then. The current trend for funky nail polish was not around yet. It reminded me of the whole "scrunchy" thing with Sex and the City (you either know what I mean by this, or don't need to bother finding out- no big thing).
So, no female characters with agency who weren't also crazy because plot, a haunted house burned down in the end by a madwoman, a narrator sadly looking back upon his tragic youth. Frankly, I didn't need any of that plot. I wanted to hear more about Ben and Harry, the young men who had fallen in love but who were caught in a society that didn't acknowledge their love and a family who expected a dynasty to continue. I wanted to read about their adventures in the forest, their love of building something beautiful, and their hope of preserving what was best about the land. But this wasn't that book.