Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

One of the most tedious, pretentious, insufferable novels I have ever read. The central characters are shallow, narcissistic, dysfunctional and to no purpose or end. As the reader you are let in on their early damage which I suppose is to set the stage for later behavior: Lotto’s beloved father’s death and his manipulative mentally-unstable mother’s rejection; Mathilde’s alienation from her original family as a child, and the cold indifference with which she is treated by reluctant caretakers. (Two subsequent guardians you later learn are shady and possibly criminal besides.) Perhaps you are supposed to understand that this shared early trauma fueled Lotto and Mathilde’s attraction, but that they should marry within two weeks of meeting with so little knowledge of each other, defies credibility. This is especially hard to believe after the author had dwelled so often on Lotto’s promiscuous escapades which he seems to need to continually feed his bottomless ego. The many peripheral character’s "friends" enter and exit the story with such little development they are like cardboard cut outs and seem to only exist as background for the two protagonists. Most of them essentially serve as "extras" on a movie set to populate a "crowd scene" in the story during which are many drunken parties, art gallery or theater openings. The snide and often supercilious interplay between the characters at these events are repetitive and empty. Conversation between any two of these peripheral characters is almost interchangeable with the exchanges of any OTHER two characters as there is little to differentiate them from each other. Over the course of the story, there were frequent quick mentions that one or another of these friends became ill, divorced, had an accident or died and yet the effect of those events seem to mean little to the main characters and less to the reader. I never felt for anyone because the author did not take the trouble to flesh them out so the reader would "know" them, their significance to the story, or why their fears and struggles should be at all interesting. Lotto is a lazy, self-indulgent, narcissistic jerk, frequently drunk, and largely aimless. He has cultivated charm for the purpose of getting what he wants or needs which most often is unqualified admiration and attention from everybody. For the first third of the book, and the first 10 years of the marriage, he is a wannabe actor and deadbeat who relies entirely on the efforts of his wife so they can live long enough to survive their early adulthood, and their marriage. There are many times where the tension around that, and other things, hints that the marriage is headed toward the rocks only to have the author pull back. For no particular reason, the next scene implies that all is well again. Lotto later discovers his talent as a playwright and has subsequent success. That’s a given in the story you are supposed to accept. But in reading the portions of these odd pretentious plays published in the novel, that seemed to me to be pretty unlikely. Early in the story, Mathilde’s character is intentionally shrouded in mystery. It is hinted that behind her cool aloofness, artificiality, and occasional nastiness there might be some important insight about her hidden depths. The latter half of the book jumps back and forth in time between her childhood, history, and current behavior in an abrupt way I found irritating. You learn that as a result of several traumatic experiences she feels abandoned, disconnected, and suspects that is because she is at heart irredeemably evil. In attempts to counter her painful social awkwardness and loneliness, she acted out in ways that were occasionally cruel or violent, or more often surreptitious and manipulative. The big "secret" about her assumed "purity" to which Lotto assigns so much importance, is revealed in the latter half of the story to be a complete sham. I don’t know if you are supposed to be surprised, impressed, or sympathetic to learn that. I was not. Nor was I surprised to learn later that the success of Lotto’s plays, finances, and their lives together, had less to do with him and more to do with her (behind-the-scenes) string-pulling. But by then I was already so weary of the characters, their issues, and their marriage, I hardly cared. The prose is purple and overblown to make, I suspect, all the random angst of the characters, seem important. What they want or hope for is muddy and unclear. WHY these two are together, with the contempt, suspicion and anger described in the private musings of each when the author chooses to go into their heads, seems completely arbitrary and often contradictory. The needs of the characters and the substance of the marriage became more bewildering rather than less over the span of the story. Intense self-absorption was the central trait of nearly every character and by the time the author suddenly decides to wind up all this meandering with supposedly profound observations about the delicacy and complexity of their "intimacy" which included "spectacular f***s" near the end of the novel, I was completely at the end of my patience! I finished the novel because I always try to finish what I start and I really wanted to give it a chance to work. But like Lotto’s and Mathilde’s marriage, the efforts to keep that "commitment" seemed in the end to take considerably more effort than it was worth!