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A review by emscji
How to Paint a Dead Man by Sarah Hall
3.0
8/9/11: Four tangentially intertwined stories told by different narrators with distinctive voices, HTPADM muses on the grand issues: love, family, art, religion, the essence of humanity. What is our purpose here on earth; how can we add to the goodness and beauty of the world without our own egos, flaws and disabilities getting in the way? How can we move ahead when our histories--personal and global--threaten to drag us down? How can we find joy and love when life is so full of evil and sadness?
The novel is ambitious. But does it deliver? I can't quite articulate where HTPADM falls flat, and the fact that I've been avoiding writing this review for 2 weeks adds to my unease. It has such grand plans--as do many of its characters--and yet I just didn't like it. It was hard to move from one narrator to the next, and I ended up dreading one narrator, happily awaiting the next; the connections between the characters seemed either contrived or unnecessary or both; the musings of the characters as they are caught in their particular traps sometimes ring false.
Yet I kept hoping that at least one of the narrators would find something--closure, happiness, an answer to these terrible questions. I suppose they all do, and yet the answers they find are always fraught, always complicated, never pure. And yet for all that, also too convenient, too pat. Ah yes, this is the end of THIS story--but what, then, is the point?
The novel is ambitious. But does it deliver? I can't quite articulate where HTPADM falls flat, and the fact that I've been avoiding writing this review for 2 weeks adds to my unease. It has such grand plans--as do many of its characters--and yet I just didn't like it. It was hard to move from one narrator to the next, and I ended up dreading one narrator, happily awaiting the next; the connections between the characters seemed either contrived or unnecessary or both; the musings of the characters as they are caught in their particular traps sometimes ring false.
Yet I kept hoping that at least one of the narrators would find something--closure, happiness, an answer to these terrible questions. I suppose they all do, and yet the answers they find are always fraught, always complicated, never pure. And yet for all that, also too convenient, too pat. Ah yes, this is the end of THIS story--but what, then, is the point?