I can’t recall the last time a first book came with such lavish advance praise as Kate Bolick’s Spinster – and from such big names, too. “Spinster is a triumph,” insists Malcolm Gladwell. “Spinster will make you rethink your entire life,” says Joanna Rakoff, the author of My Salinger Year, who believes its impact on readers will be as world-shifting as that of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. The jacket of the US edition even comes with a quote from the great Janet Malcolm, on whose beady astringency one can usually rely quite safely. She notes its “rare perspicacity”.
Are these people talking about the book I read? Even taking into account the greater tolerance of American critics for a certain kind of literary narcissism, it’s impossible to believe they are. A muddle of hedged bets, phoney arguments and half-realised biographical essays, Bolick’s memoir-cum-polemic tries hard to call attention to its own serious mindedness, but winds up being mostly rather soppy and self-indulgent. Right until its end, it feels frustratingly contingent, as if its author hasn’t the faintest idea of where she is going, or of what, really, it is that she wants to say, though I came in time to wonder if the serendipitous nature of some of her “discoveries” wasn’t also a put-on, a means of pushing some rather inconvenient facts to one side. Does she expect us to believe that, until a new biography rudely reminded her of it, she all but forgot that one of her subjects, Maeve Brennan, had married? I can’t imagine suffering from such amnesia myself.
Continue reading...
0 comments:
Post a Comment