Monday, August 20, 2012

Points of view

Did you like how each chapter had a different narrator or focus? Which character was your favorite or the most interesting to you?
Posted by at

2 comments:

kc said...

I think I like La Doll the most and her daughter Lulu. I was really riveted by their personalities and their stories. And La Doll's fall from grace (with the hot oil contraptions) was so epic; it was almost biblical in its vanity=doom equation. And the way Lulu developed along that unexpected trajectory was awesome.

I also really liked the character of Bennie's wife. The story about how much she loved to play tennis, even to the point of telling elaborate lies, was superb — and the discovery of her husband's pathetic treachery. That was such a great takedown of the male sexual psyche and how it seeks to put women "in their place" by screwing them. Women just don't behave that way; they don't think "that guy is really uppity, I really hate him, so I'm going to have sex with him!"

I did like the narrative switches. And the time switches. I'm not sure I'd like every book to be structured this way, but it did make me think a lot about perspective and how we all have these histories that really are always present in who we are right now, and we all have other people who see our lives differently from how we ourselves see them, and we can live side by side with someone and not really ever understand crucial things about that person or see him the way other people see him (because our impressions may have been locked in at a certain random point in time). I think Egan's technique was remarkably more successful than a lot of authors who do those narrative shifts from chapter to chapter.

1:54 PM, August 21, 2012
Erin said...

I agree, I think Egan did a great job with this technique. I sometimes think it's a gimmick or a crutch or something, an easy way for writers to make their novel seem different or special. And sometimes it bothers me because not all characters are equally interesting and I keep wishing I could get back to the ones I liked. But this was pretty compelling throughout.

That La Doll story was crazy! It was definitely one of the most interesting for me, too. And it might have been the most satisfying for me in terms of how things turned out. And the tennis story! I never saw that one coming.

10:51 AM, August 24, 2012

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)