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Title: The Cider House Rules
Author: John Irving
Genre: Literary fiction
Thingummies: 3
Synopsis: An orphan tries to escape following in the footsteps of the orphanage director, a obsetrician/abortionist who is the only father the boy has known.
Thoughts: This book really was destined to become an Academy-award winning movie.
It's just thought-provoking enough, just tragic enough, just treacly enough. It uses gorgeous language and occasionally genuinely funny moments to guide its characters into deep waters before tying everything up together at the end so neatly that you almost don't notice that nothing's been satisfactorily resolved at all.
This is a book full of yearnings. Homer longs to find a family. Candy longs to make a choice. Wally longs for Candy. Melony longs for a hero, Angel for an uncomplicated love, Curly for an exciting future. Dr. Larch wants a son to carry on it his footsteps. Nobody gets what they want, except for Dr. Larch, who never knows he got it.
One bit of twee-ness that particularly grates--the year is never specified. Oh, it's referred to repeatedly as 193- or 194-. If it were important that the timing be kept nebulous, I would understand. But the timing can be worked out--we are always told how old Homer and Dr. Larch are, and the bombing of Pearl Harbor is a key scene. So we can tell exactly what year it is--why play footsie? Because pretending to be coy is part of what this novel appears to be about.
Overall, it's fairly enjoyable--certainly far less precious than The World According to Garp, which has increasingly irritated me the farther I get from it. It's a solid story, neatly told. But the ending, while it's clearly what the book has been heading towards all along, is unsatisfying. When I finished, I was perfectly ok with it. But with a few days' thought, I'm now annoyed. We've been made to feel invested in the relationships between Homer and Candy and Wally and Angel. But I feel like at the end, Irving decided that the only relationship actually important is the one between Dr. Larch and Homer. Suddenly, everyone else is dropped with a wan denouement, so that Homer can end up in the place Irving wanted to place him. By all rights, the ending should blow apart the lives of all four, and it's glossed over simply because it makes things more convenient. I feel rather like Irving knew how he wanted the chessboard to look like at the very end from the very beginning, and in the last few pages, can't quite get the pieces all there. So he just picks up the king and drops it on the new square and declares the whole thing done. This is too long and too complicated a book to end so tritely.
Author: John Irving
Genre: Literary fiction
Thingummies: 3
Synopsis: An orphan tries to escape following in the footsteps of the orphanage director, a obsetrician/abortionist who is the only father the boy has known.
Thoughts: This book really was destined to become an Academy-award winning movie.
It's just thought-provoking enough, just tragic enough, just treacly enough. It uses gorgeous language and occasionally genuinely funny moments to guide its characters into deep waters before tying everything up together at the end so neatly that you almost don't notice that nothing's been satisfactorily resolved at all.
This is a book full of yearnings. Homer longs to find a family. Candy longs to make a choice. Wally longs for Candy. Melony longs for a hero, Angel for an uncomplicated love, Curly for an exciting future. Dr. Larch wants a son to carry on it his footsteps. Nobody gets what they want, except for Dr. Larch, who never knows he got it.
One bit of twee-ness that particularly grates--the year is never specified. Oh, it's referred to repeatedly as 193- or 194-. If it were important that the timing be kept nebulous, I would understand. But the timing can be worked out--we are always told how old Homer and Dr. Larch are, and the bombing of Pearl Harbor is a key scene. So we can tell exactly what year it is--why play footsie? Because pretending to be coy is part of what this novel appears to be about.
Overall, it's fairly enjoyable--certainly far less precious than The World According to Garp, which has increasingly irritated me the farther I get from it. It's a solid story, neatly told. But the ending, while it's clearly what the book has been heading towards all along, is unsatisfying. When I finished, I was perfectly ok with it. But with a few days' thought, I'm now annoyed. We've been made to feel invested in the relationships between Homer and Candy and Wally and Angel. But I feel like at the end, Irving decided that the only relationship actually important is the one between Dr. Larch and Homer. Suddenly, everyone else is dropped with a wan denouement, so that Homer can end up in the place Irving wanted to place him. By all rights, the ending should blow apart the lives of all four, and it's glossed over simply because it makes things more convenient. I feel rather like Irving knew how he wanted the chessboard to look like at the very end from the very beginning, and in the last few pages, can't quite get the pieces all there. So he just picks up the king and drops it on the new square and declares the whole thing done. This is too long and too complicated a book to end so tritely.
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Date: 2012-05-09 02:55 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2012-05-09 11:29 am (UTC)From:Cause the author didn't work out his own timeline in any great detail? Sorry, this is the copyeditor in me talking. You would not believe how often author's fuck up their own timelines. In this most recent proofread--which was pretty solid overall--there were a couple of timeline errors that the author had fixed in copyedit by taking out all specific time references. Rather than "that morning," it was "earlier." Rather than "yesterday," it was "previously." eh....that's one way to do it. I just think that all authors could be helped by keeping a document with a timeline when they are writing, and train themselves to take note every time they say something like "when she woke up," or not the phase of the moon (also removed in this--"full moon" was replaced with "luminous moon"), or the height of the sun, or any of those many time collapsing phrases, to note down exactly how much time has passed. Especially if their plot depends on a ticking time bomb element, where it is actually very important how much time is left.