the problem of an ending
Jul. 13th, 2019 05:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lotesseRead The Lake on Fire by Rosellen Brown yesterday; did read the entire thing in a day, staying up late to do so, so I suppose that's some recommendation.
Overall I think I would recommend it, tho with reservations; it was a pleasant imaginative exercise while I was immersed in it. Still, I came out pretty mad!
Positives:
-I liked the main character pair of clever, driven, angry girl and brilliant, nnt little boy. Chaya and her baby brother Asher run away together from their immigrant farming background in Wisconsin to make their fortune in 1890s Chicago. I liked Chaya very much, especially at the beginning; I liked the combination of adventurousness and acceptance in her characterization, so that she does mighty things without thinking of them as anything other than inevitable, required.
-I ended up liking the romance, overall; sharp girl is wooed by, eventually tops, soft man. I liked the LI character, Gregory, from the moment he showed up, got irritated by him for a while, but ended up pleased with his overall development.
-The descriptions of the space were very good. All of it, but especially the moments of Chaya connecting with the lake. Those were very vivid, and for me very intense, bc I have always confided my sorrows and angers and fears to the lake and received balm from it in that same way, and it was a lot to see it so directly mirrored. Most people I know who live around the lake don't even talk about it like that.
-The integration of Yiddish was lovely and enjoyable as a style element.
Negatives:
-I found the sections in autistic(?) Asher's distinctive voice contrived. Similar to the problem I had with Room, the perspective work is too aestheticized and pretty. I want to look back at Mrs. Dalloway now, to see how Septimus Warren Smith avoided setting off this irritation in me.
-The historical cameos were too commented-on and signposted, disrupting the narrative flow. I feel like you want that sort of thing to be a surprise delight, not a signboard hitting you over the head with "Jane Addams! Real Person! Important!"
-The overall fatalism of the narrative seemed to me to wobble; sometimes it was at Margaret Atwood/Emily Bronte levels, sometimes a happier Sarah Waters/Dickens register. I would have been down with either, but doing both at once caused me to react badly to elements of each in turn, and muddled the impact of the book. Things consistently do turn out well, but Chaya is upset and worried every time good things happen for her, so that the heroine is in personal distress for the entire climax of the novel, even as it's all working out beautifully. It left me emotionally confused in response.
-The ending didn't pack enough punch. It didn't work for me that Chaya's happy ending was having a baby, that the narrative rewarded her for her decision to cocoon herself away from anger during her pregnancy; the last line of the novel, the rapproachment between Chaya and her brother, is the question of the baby's name, indicating that all is well and our characters have been absorbed into the great chain of human being. It felt like the Middlemarch ending, of Dorothea settling down to be a wife and have diffuse positive influences instead of chasing an epos -- Chaya even gets to finish her husband's previously-derided book! And I'm a defender of the Middlemarch ending, but it's been 150 years and can't we do something else? I would much have preferred it if Chaya had, in fact, caught something during her work, lost the baby, and emerged with an iron-clad commitment to journalism, her husband having gotten over his attempts to immure her in cotton wool. This issue ties back to the problem of Chaya's constantly dismissed worrying about her life, that never comes to anything in the narrative; her internal critic is usually right, but I think Brown wants to give her characters a happiness that she realizes is not realistically possible under capitalism, and she isn't willing to give her HEA up in the name of realism. At one point, Chaya internally articulates the problems that having a baby will cause; another dependent, making it impossible for her to run away and start over as she successfully has before. The ending doesn't really address these worries, just goes soft-focus over the new baby and the reunited family. But since they've been brought up, the concerns hang over the HEA like a threatening stormcloud.
Overall I think I would recommend it, tho with reservations; it was a pleasant imaginative exercise while I was immersed in it. Still, I came out pretty mad!
Positives:
-I liked the main character pair of clever, driven, angry girl and brilliant, nnt little boy. Chaya and her baby brother Asher run away together from their immigrant farming background in Wisconsin to make their fortune in 1890s Chicago. I liked Chaya very much, especially at the beginning; I liked the combination of adventurousness and acceptance in her characterization, so that she does mighty things without thinking of them as anything other than inevitable, required.
-I ended up liking the romance, overall; sharp girl is wooed by, eventually tops, soft man. I liked the LI character, Gregory, from the moment he showed up, got irritated by him for a while, but ended up pleased with his overall development.
-The descriptions of the space were very good. All of it, but especially the moments of Chaya connecting with the lake. Those were very vivid, and for me very intense, bc I have always confided my sorrows and angers and fears to the lake and received balm from it in that same way, and it was a lot to see it so directly mirrored. Most people I know who live around the lake don't even talk about it like that.
-The integration of Yiddish was lovely and enjoyable as a style element.
Negatives:
-I found the sections in autistic(?) Asher's distinctive voice contrived. Similar to the problem I had with Room, the perspective work is too aestheticized and pretty. I want to look back at Mrs. Dalloway now, to see how Septimus Warren Smith avoided setting off this irritation in me.
-The historical cameos were too commented-on and signposted, disrupting the narrative flow. I feel like you want that sort of thing to be a surprise delight, not a signboard hitting you over the head with "Jane Addams! Real Person! Important!"
-The overall fatalism of the narrative seemed to me to wobble; sometimes it was at Margaret Atwood/Emily Bronte levels, sometimes a happier Sarah Waters/Dickens register. I would have been down with either, but doing both at once caused me to react badly to elements of each in turn, and muddled the impact of the book. Things consistently do turn out well, but Chaya is upset and worried every time good things happen for her, so that the heroine is in personal distress for the entire climax of the novel, even as it's all working out beautifully. It left me emotionally confused in response.
-The ending didn't pack enough punch. It didn't work for me that Chaya's happy ending was having a baby, that the narrative rewarded her for her decision to cocoon herself away from anger during her pregnancy; the last line of the novel, the rapproachment between Chaya and her brother, is the question of the baby's name, indicating that all is well and our characters have been absorbed into the great chain of human being. It felt like the Middlemarch ending, of Dorothea settling down to be a wife and have diffuse positive influences instead of chasing an epos -- Chaya even gets to finish her husband's previously-derided book! And I'm a defender of the Middlemarch ending, but it's been 150 years and can't we do something else? I would much have preferred it if Chaya had, in fact, caught something during her work, lost the baby, and emerged with an iron-clad commitment to journalism, her husband having gotten over his attempts to immure her in cotton wool. This issue ties back to the problem of Chaya's constantly dismissed worrying about her life, that never comes to anything in the narrative; her internal critic is usually right, but I think Brown wants to give her characters a happiness that she realizes is not realistically possible under capitalism, and she isn't willing to give her HEA up in the name of realism. At one point, Chaya internally articulates the problems that having a baby will cause; another dependent, making it impossible for her to run away and start over as she successfully has before. The ending doesn't really address these worries, just goes soft-focus over the new baby and the reunited family. But since they've been brought up, the concerns hang over the HEA like a threatening stormcloud.
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Date: 2019-07-16 07:35 pm (UTC)