When She Woke by Hillary Jordan

Tags

Hillary Jordan, Mudbound, When She Woke

I was a HUGE fan of Hilary Jordan’s Mudbound, so much so that I read it three times, savoring every word each time. It’s a beautiful novel written in electric prose and is an absolute pleasure to read. It’s delicious, and I highly recommend reading that. Jordan employs the same electric style of writing for When She Woke, BUT somewhere in the middle, the novel shorts out and becomes dreary and unbelievable.

Jordan pays much homage to The Scarlet Letter here. First of all, there’s the red. Hanna Payne is injected with a virus to pay for her crime that turns her entire being red. There you go with the scarlet. Next, she’s Hanna Payne (ref: Hester Prynne). Her lover, the man who impregnated her, is the famously reverent, Reverend Aidan Dale (get it? Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale??) Other reviewers, along with the promoters of the book, have also compared the novel to Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale, I guess because of the dystopian view of the future, and also there’s a whole element where after “The Scourge” of the future, many women are rendered infertile, but I found Jordan’s view of this future sketchy at best. For the most part, it seems much like we live now; only it’s a more religiously fundamental state. People still sew, eat fast food, drive electric cars, and (I personally found this kind of random) shop at Target.

There are a few threads that go nowhere, for example much is made of Hanna’s talent for sewing, and when she is put in a kind of halfway house type rehabilitation program, she is forced to make herself a doll to represent the baby she aborted. Jordan goes into the details of the doll, how lovingly rendered it is, (and btw, Hanna names the doll “Pearl”, thank you Mr. Hawthorne), but then she just leaves the doll behind as the adventure continues, and what was the point of all that detail?

There’s a kidnapping sub-plot along the sort of underground railroad to get the Chromes out of the country to safety, and though there’s generally a lot of pining for the reverend that becomes almost like Jordan’s beating the reader over the head, like she’s getting paid on Louisa May Alcott plan, there’s this crazy diversion toward the end with a lesbian sexual experience that just left me like, what?? What was the point of that except to say that fundamentalist Christians shouldn’t knock it ‘til they try it?

Then right after that, (SPOILER ALERT) even though Hanna had a lovely time, she goes looking for the reverend in a part of the book that totally went against what we know about the characters…and then at the end, it gets even more preposterous.

I can’t tell you how disappointing the novel was. And I feel awful for hating it because I loved Mudbound so much. But When She Woke just didn’t do it for me.

The Leftovers by Tom Perotta

Tags

book review, Books, fiction, novel, The Leftovers, Tom Perotta

Click for more details at Amazon.com

I have been a fan of Tom Perotta since his collection of short stories, Bad Haircut was published in the late-90′s. Many of his books are poignant and funny with characters that are well drawn and easy to relate to. The back cover of his latest, The Leftovers, goes so far as to proclaim him the “Steinbeck of Suburbia.” I wouldn’t say that, but he does do a great job of capturing suburban life, especially suburban life in New Jersey.

His latest is about a town reeling in the wake of a “Rapture-like” phenomenon where millions of people simple vanish at once. It focuses on one family and how they deal with it in different ways. I think the message of the book is basically that “things happen” and you have to move on, which we each do in our own ways, but this tale gets a bit far-fetched at times, and toward the end the plot really thins, especially when it comes to the story of the wife.

She joins a sort of post-Rapture cult called the Guilty Remnant. For all of Perotta’s ability to make things seem real, his talent for capturing what it’s really like to live in suburbia, this whole guilty remnant plot really felt convoluted and not too believable.

Another character, Nora, a woman who has lost her whole family spends most of the novel in a state of suspended animation. She can’t move on, though she desperately wants to. She’s so numb though, that it’s hard to relate to her as a reader. She strings along a lover, who’s also hard to know, and in the end, she has a sudden change of character that seems to come out of the blue, though I am sure the author intended for that change to mean something in a larger sense.

I would put Perotta in the same category as Nick Hornby or Curtis Sittenfield. Good story teller, but when wieghted down with larger themes, the stories tend to lose focus.