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.

The Great Man by Kate Christensen

What is up with award winners? Is fiction really such in dire straits? And if so, why did that bitch dissuade me from fiction writing by saying that I am "not a genius," if clearly you only need a word processor in order to win a PEN/Faulkner?

Okay, that is a bit harsh... But seriously, is this as good as we can get? A rather facile story of one man's women? Somewhat like The Women, it is a mostly female story about a man and the women who fight over his sorry ass. To be fair, I'm not sure how much I hate the book and how much I hate the story--a distinction that is really only needed in a book review or a writing workshop.

And do I hate the characters or how they are characterized? Teddy with Sancerre (my favorite wine and therefore, perhaps a source of my annoyance) and fancy food; Abigail with Zabars. I get it, consumer choices expose personality (especially in superficial New York), but in this book, it comes off as showing off and/or laziness. Even Bret Easton Ellis knows you can't build an entire character on his consumer choices.

So what is the big picture here? That the women are more fascinating than the Great Man. That love is complicated. That relationships are complicated. That biographers have an agenda. That death and talking about the recently departed brings up a lot of complicated feelings, including our resentment of this person and then guilt about that resentment. I don't think that all good books need to surprise me with philosophical revelations more deep than these, but they can reveal them in a way that makes them surprising, refreshing, not that remind me of my "deep thoughts" as a college freshman.

Fuck you, Agatha Christie

Nothing ruins one's day quite like some throw-away anti-Semitism (and anti-Scots):

"They [*] are usually Scotch gentlemen, but I suspect a Semitic strain in their ancestry." (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, 168)

The character who says this is, at this point of the book, supposed to be the mild-mannered, everyday sort of chap. The woman to whom he is speaking (who is being hounded by the Semitic Scotsmen) is a dithering, greedy idiot.

So fuck you from the bottom of my partially-Scotch and completely Semite-friendly heart.

* "They" are presumably loan sharks but are only referred to as "Scotch gentlemen."