Bitter Grace

My book group likes this mess, and I do not.

I do not want to read books about WASPs who are oblivious to the world beyond the city that they live in. And even in that city, they are about some white people striving and oblivious to anything beyond their own attempt to make it.

They can discuss the trappings of wealth in detail, but when it comes to discussing people, it goes like this:

The interior was a fantasy of soon-to-be-cliched Oriental fixtures: large porcelain urns, brass Buddhas, red latterns, and self-postured silent deference of an Oriental waistaff (the last servile ethnicity of American's nineteenth century immigrant classes.)

Holy hell. That is racist.

Then if that was not enough,

In front of me a broad-shouldered man with the twang of an oil-producing state was trying to communicate with the maitre d'

This is racist against Asian people AND white people all in two paragraphs. The character making this observation cannot be bothered to figure out if someone is from Texas or Oklahoma, but they decide that the rude person in the restaurant is from Texas because who cares about anything outside of New York City. Truly, a literary achievement.

Now, this author is a talented and capable author, but was any of this scene really necessary?

In the first chapters, there are references to so many other books, as if it is inviting you to write a Ph.D. thesis.

The most obvious thesis id about how this book compares to "Great Expectations." The author invites that comparison so many times. One of the characters picks up "Great Expectations" and turns to Chapter 20 as soon as she hears from her friends to London. That is the chapter in the book where Pip, the young character from "Great Expectations" goes to London, and it is just a dirty and corrupt place to be.

In this book, like in "Great Expectations," there is a wealthy benefactor warping the characters around herself, but it is best to leave the details of that for the people who are interested in the book.

Chapter Six is "The Cruelest Month," and it starts with "One night in April" slamming you over the head with T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land."

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

There are too many characters in this book that like to read, and they like to read the type of literature that is ruined by high school English teachers. These characters are absolutely obsessed with "Walden;" and I am happy for them for being able to conceive of Massachusetts, a state outside of New York, but not really.