Us Fools

Review

I read this for my small press book club. I am not sure why I stuck with it. On page 11, we have this sentence:

Sylvia, our mother, reminded Henry daily, such was the routine of marriage, about fixing the ladder daily and went about partitioning the attic space, figuring if they were to have children, they would need a place to store them.

I know it is snobby of me to take issue with the writing, and I know there are better things I could do with my time than critique a published author. But, really, where was the editor? My emphasis in the above highlights just one problem, a strange repetition that doesn’t make sense. There is also too much going on in the sentence. 39 words! That’s 15% of the Gettysburg Address! Too long. I also think it’s trite. The same-word-in-one-sentence problem didn’t recur often enough for me to notice, but overlong sentences full of overdone triteness became the standard.

At times it felt stream of consciousness, but the consciousness is a tremendous bummer. My friends know that I like reading sad things, frustrating things, whatever, but this felt like 350 pages of a person complaining about their world and taking not a single action of consequence in their life. The protagonist feels utterly passive and so, so, deeply boring.

Frequently, sentences with concepts and ‘points’ came out of nowhere in the middle of the story. Though, there is not much story. In general we follow the protagonist through their childhood to the present moment and bounce around time a little. We’re mostly concerned with their insufferable sister and the character’s total unwillingness to cut off their family. The first part of the book features a lot about the farm crisis in the 80s which was interesting! But this falls away and the book becomes solidly about the sisters and that was not interesting, even a little.

I did not like the writing style, I think that’s clear. Another thing that occasionally happened is the author throwing in tweet-sized social commentary. One or two sentences on a variety of topics that feel like doomsaying, read as quasi-edgy or depressed, and sound so hollow and unoriginal. The farm crisis chapters do a really good job of showing the impact of decisions and policies and systems of the world on real people. This is what social commentary can and should look like. One or two sentences out of the blue in an unrelated paragraph is not good writing.

There are a few sentences that repeat almost word for word once or twice. I meant to go and track these down, but I disliked the book so much I didn’t feel like it’d earned that time from me. The one I remember is about a boy being like a newt, or something like that. It shows up early and then again about 200 pages later. This feels like an artifact of a stylistic choice, something about cycles or repetition. But it seems half-baked to the extent that I can’t tell if it’s an intentional choice or the writer just forgetting that sentence is somewhere else already.

The dialogue is… bizarre. I have never heard anyone talk like this. That’s because people do not speak like this. I could buy a weird sentence every once and a while, but these characters consistently speak like made up people without a shred of truth. I would sort of love to know why the author writes dialogue like this. Does it sound true to them?

And this is the biggest thing. I am from rural Illinois. I also fled to Chicago. I also eventually went to the University of Chicago. There is in fact so much in the protagonist and their story that I can either fully or partially connect to in a way that is beyond typical empathy that I really, really wanted to like this. I wanted to understand it. But these characters don’t speak like the people from Illinois that I know – be it southern, central, or northern. I’m a huge bummer and often sad, and yet I find the bummer sad protagonist really annoying. What gives?

Super disappointed. Also I hate the cover art (the picture has nothing at all even vaguely to do with the story so I don’t get it at all).