I love all the subtleties that makes up this book – it has as many pages written in between the lines as it has actual pages.
The burden of past things we haven’t let go off, and the millions of ways that shapes our lives, and the people we become… There is something heartbreakingly true and quietly poetic in the ways this is described in this book.
Fragmented truths both in some ways understood and yet just beyond comprehension, as life is, when viewed though the memories of just the one person, without the all-knowing author helping him (or the reader) out with the bigger picture.
I love how the book doesn’t overstep the first-person narrative – so much is left unexplained and unexplored about the other characters, because the male, main character just does not understand the women around him. (He might love them, but he is not curious about who they are – he never learned to be.)
It leaves the reader to fill in the blanks and makes the tale so much bigger than itself, which, if you ask me, is a part of the definition of what makes good art.
I find it so fascinating, that she was able to do this so well – It would have been excruciatingly hard for me not to give the sister her own voice in this particular story. And more impressively, I have read many books where this sort of approach just leaves the rest of the characters feeling very one-dimensional and you end up not engaging with them at all.
With this book, it’s the complete opposite.
It let me connect strongly with the sister, even though she is only viewed through the lenses of her brother’s entitlement. It gave me room to pour parts of my own experience into the in-between, and that let to many reflections about my own paths, choices, family-roles and the ways that I have healed my own childhood traumas. How chained up you are to your own roots if you don’t do this work, and how that process is on-going through your whole life.
I grew up being the big sister in a family with, in some ways, a similar sort of father figure, and I found it very poetic the way Patchett shows how the absence of parental love can leave you simultaneously extremely resilient and very fragile in your adult life in so many different ways.
And I love how the house is used as such a visceral and symbolic character in the book. Beautifully done.
I would defiantly recommend this book, but it will not be for everyone. It will demand a thoughtful reader and not one looking for entertainment only. I skimmed a few bookreads-reviews and several of them deemed the behavior of the characters as “unrealistic”. Like Danny and Maeve always sitting in the parked car in front of the house. Those comments really baffled me. I suspect it might be a symptom of not doing the reading between the lines, expecting the book to hand you all the “whys” up front. Or maybe it just means that none of it resonated with those people’s own life experiences at all. Guess it doesn’t matter.
Art that has something to say, will never resonate with everyone.
And that’s the way it should be.
It made perfect sense to me, though.
Thank you, Ann Patchett.