Cara Hoffman

"Bridey Sullivan, a young American woman who has fled a peculiar and traumatic upbringing in Washington State, takes up with a queer British couple, the poet Milo Rollack, and Eton drop-out Jasper Lethe. Slipping in and out of homelessness, addiction, and under-the-table jobs, they create their own kind of family as they struggle to survive"--Amazon.com.

A Novel

Running

Laura

Not since starting this blog have I stopped and erased and restarted a review as many times as I have this book. I first attempted to write a review when I finished the novel for the first time, but decided I needed more time to think this book through. It's been two days, and I still think I need more time, though frankly at this point it could be one month later and I'd still not be able to get my thoughts entirely collected and articulate enough to be able to express exactly what this book did to me.

Because here's the thing. I didn't love this book while reading it. In fact, I spent most of the reading experience not knowing how to feel about the characters, the prose, the plot, you know, the three main things a reader is supposed to connect to to enjoy a novel. 

In fact, one might look at this book and think I would hate it, because it screams pretension, and even if this novel ends up topping your best of 2017 list you can't really deny that Hoffman has set out to write Literature with a capital L. Sad, really, because the most this novel could probably hope for is a devoted cult following, given that Hoffman is not a big name in the literary world even after three novels (by big name I mean someone along the same lines as Philip Roth, Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, etc, authors who will regardless of personal taste go down in the classical canon, if even for one work) all of which have amazingly low scores for Goodreads, a website where almost every book has a score in the middling to upper three stars. Normally, I dislike books that are so transparently written to be Literature, since books like that often feel phony in some way. 

But there's something about this book that just, well, mesmerized me. The grittiness of the setting, the despicable characters, all of that just grabbed me. There's something very Beat Generation about it, and as I have a huge, little known soft spot for the much hated Beatniks it was easy for it to work for me. Also, I don't demand likability from my characters, unless of course the author demands it from me in which case the character is usually insufferable, so I wasn't too bothered by the horribleness of all three of the main characters- even Milo, the most likely candidate for the story's moral center. Four if you count Declan. I actually liked that Hoffman had so much confidence in her writing ability that the characters' ugliness worked well with the story, and I have to give her major props for refusing to add a character to function as an actual villain. Even Declan can't be wholly considered a villain, because, as Bridey says, he's still their friend. This was smart of Hoffman, and by doing so she introduces a great point so little seen done well in literature- that there are no villains in real life, because everyone is absolutely awful to each other.

Continue reading this review on my blog here: https://bookwormbasics.blogspot.com/2...

Running A Novel

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