The Great Man by Kate Christensen (part 2)

So I finished and I still hate it. The end of the book reads: "Abigail Feldman, the late Maxine Feldman, and Teddy St. Cloud emerge in both biographies as fascinating subjects in their own right, so fascinating that this female reviewer couldn't help wishing Mr. Feldman had moved over and given his real-life women a little more room" (305). Yes, these women should be fascinating, but even after spending over 300 pages with them, they have not proven that yet. There's little depth to their characters, but they have all the possibilities for depth. They devolve from interesting possibilities to a crappy sitcom characters pretty damn quickly. I like that older women in fiction are still getting laid, but there are touches of The Golden Girls here, that I appreciate in TV Land, not so much in a novel.

The book is frequently referred to as a "comedy of manners," which would explain the lack of depth in the characters, but frankly, I don't see it. I am close enough to this social class to "get the joke," but they are few and far between. And some of the social observations are plain stereotypes, as with the educated, effete, black biographer and the harried, sex-starved, adulterous non-black biographer.

I have had years of fiction workshops and several more of literature classes, and do not see where the artistry lies in this book. If anything, this book proves to me that all you need to be a successful fiction writer these days is an overinflated ego, a word processor, and desperate critics.