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A review by trin
The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott
2.0
Faux. A case where I believe the author meant well, and wanted to highlight forgotten women's stories, but this novel felt inauthentic to me from beginning to end. And not just inauthentic: weirdly cold and unemotional. Among the stories Prescott tries to tell is a forbidden lesbian romance between two spies--and I appreciate the attempt!--but it's utterly passionless on the page. Same with the romance between Boris Pasternak and his mistress Olga. Characters keep saying that what's made Doctor Zhivago a lasting work is the love story at its core, the depth of feeling between Yuri and Lara--but where is that here?
Here, there is simply a lot of flat, often-interchangeable first person narration--as well as a flattening of what I feel would have been the real issues of the time. I love the idea of the members of the CIA typing pool all looking out for each other, for example, but Prescott just drops in the fact that one typist is black--yet never alludes to the racial prejudice she must have faced, or the likelihood of her being welcomed easily into a gang of white women--shopping and dining with them, going out--in 1950s Washington, D.C. I visited a friend down there recently and there were still people flying confederate flags just over the border in Virginia.
Even outside the realm of politics and intersectionality: early on in the book, Olga, who's been taken to the gulag, writes a letter to the interrogator who landed her there, and it's so obviously and ridiculously something that no real person would ever compose (even if it's clear she never sends it) that I had to put the book down for a while, I was rolling my eyes so hard. I just didn't believe it. And I never could: believe in, or lose myself in, or feel anything for the characters and scenarios described in this book.
Worst of all, Prescott never manages to convey why the novel at the core of this story, the one she's lauding, was so important. What was it about Doctor Zhivago that so frightened the Soviet state? Why was it effective as a weapon? Why was it worth all this--because none of the previous are explained, seemingly silly--spycraft? This book will not tell you.
It may, however, succeed in making you wish you had just read Pasternak instead. I know I do.
Here, there is simply a lot of flat, often-interchangeable first person narration--as well as a flattening of what I feel would have been the real issues of the time. I love the idea of the members of the CIA typing pool all looking out for each other, for example, but Prescott just drops in the fact that one typist is black--yet never alludes to the racial prejudice she must have faced, or the likelihood of her being welcomed easily into a gang of white women--shopping and dining with them, going out--in 1950s Washington, D.C. I visited a friend down there recently and there were still people flying confederate flags just over the border in Virginia.
Even outside the realm of politics and intersectionality: early on in the book, Olga, who's been taken to the gulag, writes a letter to the interrogator who landed her there, and it's so obviously and ridiculously something that no real person would ever compose (even if it's clear she never sends it) that I had to put the book down for a while, I was rolling my eyes so hard. I just didn't believe it. And I never could: believe in, or lose myself in, or feel anything for the characters and scenarios described in this book.
Worst of all, Prescott never manages to convey why the novel at the core of this story, the one she's lauding, was so important. What was it about Doctor Zhivago that so frightened the Soviet state? Why was it effective as a weapon? Why was it worth all this--because none of the previous are explained, seemingly silly--spycraft? This book will not tell you.
It may, however, succeed in making you wish you had just read Pasternak instead. I know I do.