Category: Fiction

The Year of Needy Girls by Patricia A. Smith

6/29/2017

This is a tale of a modern-day witch hunt and, simultaneously, an accurate portrayal of lives that intersect the fortunes of fancy private New England schools. Unfortunately, its subject matter is also ripped directly from today's headlines, as the experiences Laura Kipnis relays in her fascinating article "Eyewitness to a Title IX Witch Trial" in the 2 April issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, and that she addresses in more depth in her book Unwanted Advances, make us painfully aware. While acknowledging that there is no doubt that sexual assault on
campuses across the country is a very serious issue, particularly for survivors of such abuse, the book details how even an unsubstantiated accusation can completely devastate a life, both
externally in terms of loss of respect of family, friends, students, and colleagues, not to mention loss of career prospects and income, and internally in terms of sowing self-doubt.

With its fictionalized consideration of such a pertinent and weighty issue, I found this book a very interesting read. Nevertheless, to say that I enjoyed it would be an overstatement. It moved along at a good pace, and both the internal thoughts of its main character and the action sequences were gripping. But while I recognize that the main relationship under scrutiny here was the possibly-abusive one, I found the adult relationships in the story insufficiently developed. In particular, the main character's intimate relationship, which I think the author intended to provide an important counterpoint to the possibly-abusive one, seemed hollow. I also found the main character's partner's deep and instant affinity for the man who would undeniably perpetrate abduction, sex crimes, and murder insufficiently explained. Furthermore, I didn't understand why some of the students' parents harbored such disdain for the main character or why the new woman to the community made such an effort to support her. I would have found the book much stronger if these relationships had been more developed and made to make more intellectual and/or emotional sense.

Another issue for me is that the book wrapped up too quickly and superficially and neatly for my taste. This was the case both with respect to the possible abuse, and with respect to the parallel story line of the abduction, confirmed sexual abuse, and murder of a local boy from the wrong side of the tracks. After all the angst and drama and brouhaha, everything just wraps up very nicely and suddenly. Was there a reason for that, or did the author just run out of steam? The idea underlying the book is such a good one, and the juxtaposition of the two stories so apt, that, overall, I guess I just expected the aspects of the book that were not directly related to school sexual abuse to be handled more deftly, deeply, and believably than they were.

--Patricia Johann
Regular contributor & ASU professor

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The Idiot by Elif Bautman

2/23/2017

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Having previously read and enjoyed "The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them" by Elif Batuman, I was eager to read the author's newest effort, "The Idiot". Like its predecessor, this book is also titled after a work of Dostoevsky. Batuman is, like the main character Selin, a Turkish-American Harvard grad, and the authority with which she writes of ivy-league life and the various cultures playing a role in "The Idiot" make the thinly-disguised autobiographical tone of this novel even more apparent than they would be already. The narrative consists mainly of detailing some of the confusions Selin encounters --- confusions that naturally accompany youth, going off to college for the first time, friendships that one does not feel sufficiently cool to be worthy of, doubt-inducing first love, the self- and culturally-reflective lens of international travel, and the broadening out of one's experiences in general. We follow Selin as she attempts to understand and find meaning in the feelings and experiences she has during her freshman year at Harvard and in the summer thereafter.

While I enjoyed "The Idiot" well enough, I did not find it as good a read as "The Possessed". For me, "The Idiot"'s narrative was not only fragmented, but also mind-jarringly intricate in some places and insufficiently detailed to follow in others. I also found the tone of the book very "flip", like it was trying way too hard and self-consciously to be cool. Perhaps this was intentional --- certainly one's internal dialogue can be like that as one's life is being lived --- but I found it tedious in a 430+ page novel. I also found the book's ending sort of non-existent, and therefore disappointing. But perhaps that was intentional, too, reflecting the way that the transition from one chapter of one's life to another can be both undramatic and underwhelming enough to make it hard to identify in real-time. Finally, I thought there was a lot of unrealized potential to explore the role of language in Selin's (narrated and imagined future) personal and professional lives. The official blurb for the book says it's about Selin's coming to grips with "the ineffable and exhilarating confusion of first love, and with the growing consciousness that she is doomed to become a writer". But while the former aspect of Selin's confusion was developed to the point of tedium, the latter was, in my reading, touched on only obliquely. Perhaps that's why this flip romp through many deep and interesting aspects of coming of age felt so directionless and fell so flat for me.

-Patricia Johann

Release Date: March 14, 2017

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