Friday, February 11, 2011
Characters
All of the stories seemed to have a deeply sad twist, which, even though I loved the book, left me with a faintly bitter aftertaste. I mean, it just felt like every single person connected with this dying newspaper had some kind of deep flaw, weakness, unhappiness, etc. Did that seem realistic to you? Am I missing something?
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6 comments:
I'm with you. Newspapers might have more than their fair share of down-and-out characters, but this was too much. Nobody was happy or well-adjusted in this place. I suppose screwed up lives make for more interesting stories, but it did seem a bit unrealistic.
Everyone had so many regrets. It was hard to take at times, but I did like the book and feel bad for the characters.
I thought the women almost universally took a hit for either being capricious, unfaithful, hard, etc., but perhaps every main character was skewered at least a little. Maybe the exception was Ruby, whose love and loneliness was extremely uncomfortable but real, too.
The stories were all hard-hitting in various ways. Gut-wrenching. Oliver's dog at the end, that was a hard read, and after the nature of the obit writer's story, where I became attached to Pickle, I sensed some tragedy would befall Oliver, too. There was a nameless hatred to that scene that seemed out of proportion to the realities of closing a newsroom, I guess. (I mean, it was inhumane by any standards but, as a literary device, too big for what precipitated it.)
cl, I had that feeling too about the women. I didn't walk away feeling that the book was sexist per se, but something about the presentation made me understand that the book was clearly written by a man, something about the point of view or word choice. I could just tell. I don't think a woman would write the story of the chief financial officer in the same way, for example, that whole weird buildup to a sexual humiliation as payback. It had such an abrupt ending, with no explanation, like we were all just supposed to understand the power of that scene because we had all daydreamed at some point about sexually humiliating someone or something! Strange. I thought it lacked depth.
Agreed on the dog scene. That came from nowhere for me. And who would do that? Someone who knew exactly how much the dog meant to him AND someone who was capable of killing an animal like that. Just seemed bizarre and gratuitously sad.
Erin, you mention that nobody seemed happy or well-adjusted, and that made me think he left out the photographers! (Annika is a photographer adjusting to the digital world, but she doesn't work for the paper. And she's certainly not well-adjusted). He didn't include an RG or MY, two guys who are always upbeat and friendly and carefree, seemingly above workplace politics and petty ladder-climbing and navel-gazing. They just come to work, give it their all, do what's expected of them and go home to rewarding personal lives! Couldn't they be compelling characters in our book?
Thank you, kc, for pointing out that the book was obviously from a male perspective. I felt that way, too, but I didn't want to bring it up because I was afraid I was the only one who would think that.
There was a certain, for lack of a better term, unnecessary aggressiveness to certain aspects of the book. I don't know how else to put it -- it just feels like this particular author is somehow handicapped by his sex. I still liked the book and cared about the characters, but there were many times when one would say or do something that just didn't feel right, like they were limited by the author's perspective on the world.
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