Author: Alena Graedon
Publisher: Random House
Rating: WARTY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.
If a book blurb contains the word 'literary' I turn and walk the other way. Unfortunately, this book blurb doesn't even offer that much of a toxicity warning, and it actually sounded like a novel I would like to read, but once again I found I had been completely misled by the blurb. Neither did the blurb warn me that this was a first person PoV novel - a form which I typically find to be obnoxious, especially if it's YA. This one isn't YA, but the problems with it were myriad nonetheless.
The first issue is that it never drew me in: there was no hook, there was nothing interesting happening, there was nothing mystifying, nothing irresistible, and nothing which made me want to turn another page - or in this case, swipe another screen. The reading of it was nothing but a slog from the off, and I was less than five percent into it when it became clear to me that all this novel was, in the final analysis, a rambling attempt at being deep about the English language, which failed miserably. The pretence underlying this pretentiousness is that electronics is bad for us, and that losing the printed language will be the death of society, but this novel is available in ebook form! How hypocritical can you get?
The novel is also blind to reality. It presents not only as some sort of "the end is nigh" warning, but also as a rallying cry to us all to get back to the fifties (or something - I'm not sure what), as though life were better before electronics came into it. But for all its urging to get back to being literary, and to embrace the subjects of Eng. Lang. and Eng. Lit., the novel completely ignores other subjects, particularly the sciences, and within those immense spectra, the topic which underlies the entire discipline of biology: evolution. It ignores the fact that hominins (the most human branch of the Hominidae family tree) have not only been around a lot longer than electronics, they've also been around a hell of a lot longer than not only the printed word, but also recognizable language itself. Thus the basic premise of this novel is shown to be fatuous.
Even so, I could still have enjoyed a novel that argued otherwise, had it been actually telling me a story - and one which wasn't tedious and all over the place - indeed, everywhere save anywhere interesting and engaging. This story was so dissipated, so given to endless digression, so larded with parenthetical treatises and asides, that I honestly could not stand to read it. After five percent I gave up hope that this might actually go somewhere worthwhile, and I skimmed to about 11% without seeing any vestige of a respite from horrendously long paragraphs of drivel and parenthetical comment after parenthetical comment. It's like reading a really bad high-school essay written by a kid who has a bee in their bonnet, but who has neither thought through the topic, nor prepared an outline before launching into the essay.
Overall the biggest condemnation is that nothing happened and I said, "Enough, already!" Life is too short to waste on pretentiously rambling drivel which simply cannot get off its high horse and actually tell us a story, and which is, ultimately, little more than an exercise in showing off how much of the dictionary you've internalized, or how literate or worse, "literary", you are.
This is not a story, it's a person who crams in next to you on the subway and proceeds to unload their inanely digressive life story upon you, when you have better things on which to focus if only you could get a moment's uninterrupted thought. In short, it does the very thing it pretends to rail against! I cannot recommend this novel. Go read Max Barry's Lexicon instead. It's a similar novel in that it's about the use and abuse of language, but it's one that's done right.
