Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Who am I to disagree with the reviews of the NYT, WAPO, NPR and The New Yorker? No one special, I can assure you. I simply don’t understand their over the top appraisal of this novel. And, I will have my say. I wanted to love it! I give the author credit for some choice phrases that ring with clarity such as: “skin like lacquered walnut meat,” and “his wife posting atop him like a prize equestrienne.” I get the allusion to the classics including the author’s version of the Greek chorus -- enclosed in brackets throughout -- “[So immense, what was between them, immortal.]” I get the obscure reference to Medea with Mathilde’s killing of her own unborn child in order to punish her husband and allow him to long for parenthood the rest of his life. But for the most part, the language throughout the novel is not just self-indulgent, it is infuriatingly extravagant. A well-chosen verb can bring magic to a sentence. But to pack one’s prose with convoluted flourishes that serve no purpose in the narrative but to impress, is a wasteful use of the reader’s time and effort (and money). We are shown a world in which the characters are mere caricatures whose answer to all of life’s trials is an easy and vulgar venture into sex or worse, to manipulate and cause pain, if not disaster. Mathilde is portrayed as an evil puppet master who pulls Lotto’s strings throughout their marriage. He is unknowing, but worse than that, he doesn’t care, as he is so completely obsessed with his own success, his own pain. She is evil in her retribution of the family who abandoned her as a child. She is evil in her retaliation of her husband’s best friend until at the end when she burns incriminating evidence against him, this, her one significant redeeming act. I don’t require models of virtue in my reading, but to have no suggestion of interior conflict in the characters, no moments of self-evaluation, no quiet introspection, I think, demeans the work. These people live on a plane that is strictly physical, superficial and arrogant. They are like props on the stage, vapid and strident, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” If we can’t believe in them, how can we care about them? I was temporarily intrigued by the Lotto-Leo episode which ended abruptly with Leo’s untimely death. The question, then, is why? Why are we introduced to this tangential relationship which is then abruptly ended? It serves no purpose and does not move the story forward. In the end, the book is a great disappointment and (in my opinion) a failed attempt at profundity. 2016 Pulitzer? Please.