I don’t usually mind being surprised by books, but this one really surprised me in a negative way. There is no way to avoid spoilers in order to review this book, so if you do want to read it, then don’t read on.
The premise of this book is very simple. The main character, a young woman, has reached a point in her life where she feels like she needs to have a break from it. Therefore, as any reasonable person would, she decides to fall into a prescription drug-induced haze and just sleep for a year, not really having a concrete plan as to how that will really improve her existence and not being sure if this will actually make her feel happy and refreshed. Also, I may add another caveat here – if she will even survive, given the amount of pills she eventually takes. I liked this general idea because I thought that the concept of people wishing to disconnect from the world we live in is quite a fascinating notion to explore, and yet …
Reading about someone constantly going to sleep doesn’t sound very interesting and that’s because it’s not. Nothing else really happens in the book. The reader does get a vague insight into her life before this – her complicated relationship with her mother, her dependency on the therapist from hell who constantly prescribes her any kind of drug she can think of, her incredibly toxic relationship with her ex-boyfriend, her even more toxic friendship with her only friend Reva, who’s the only character who is actually given a real role in this story, and finally there are brief glimpses into her last job at an art gallery.
The narrator is the most insufferable character I have ever come across in a book and I don’t say that lightly. On the one hand, I can appreciate the fact that the things that are objectively meant to make people happy, such as money, good looks, charm and so on, do not always make people happy and that depression or a feeling of ennui can affect anyone, no matter their circumstances. However, the narrator was not in any way sympathetic, because she constantly points out that she has those things and yet that she feels superior to those who don’t, such as Reva. On account of this, whatever interest I had in the idea behind the story quickly disappeared.
Lastly, this may just be me, but I found the author’s writing to be quite primitive. Sometimes it was beautiful and thought-provoking, when she did not try to rely on pure shock value. However, what seemed really unnecessary and basic was the added sense of doom as from the first pages it was clear that the narrator would awake around the time of 9/11 and that this event would be important, which was emphasised throughout the book in ways that seemed like someone making their first attempt at introducing foreshadowing in a book. For example, when Reva mentions that she will start working in the towers or when the narrator mentions more than once that her ex-boyfriend works in one of the towers. I still don’t quite understand what the point of that was, beyond trying to make the drama of Reva’s death – and with that the narrator losing the only person who symbolised her link to reality – more dramatic. This seemed very weak and, in my eyes, exploitative, which is how I usually feel about authors who rely on real-life events to add more to the plot and drama of their stories.
I would have known that something was not quite right with this book, had I paid a little more attention and noticed that all of the praise listed on the back of the copy I bought is for the author’s other book ‘Eileen’, which I have not read. A bad sign if there ever was one. However, that can happen when one just quicky reads the blurb and finds the cover of a book intriguing.
To conclude, would I recommend that you read this book? Strangely, yes. Although I found it irritating and for that reason quite difficult to get through, one thing must be said though – it is definitely original, from the format to the bizarre mix of characters. This will not, however, be a book that I will ever pick up and read again.
I give this book two out of five wine bottles.
Books and wine. 