50bookchallenge #18/50
I confess: I find it difficult to respect short novels. It has to do with expectations, I’m sure, as I love short stories. When I can finish a book in under 24 hours I feel as though perhaps I didn’t get my money’s worth. Faithful was part of my entertainment for a flight from the East Coast back to San Francisco. Granted that this was a trip with a canceled connection where I ended up waiting in the Las Vegas airport for eight hours, so I had plenty of time to read, but this novel did seem a bit light.
I have a twinge of guilt judging this book. This is Sigerson’s first novel and I enjoyed reading it. I experienced a spooky personal connection to the characters, and that certainly speaks well for the author’s first time at bat. I’m estimating it weighs in at about 65,000 words, so perhaps technically it’s a novella. Not sure who makes up the rules for this kind of technicality, but there you have it.
Sigerson is a good writer but not a great one. The description «light» has as much to do with the depth of his description as the wordcount. This is an attribute with definite tradeoffs. It means that for a novella there was a full story arc: beginning, middle, endall the good structural elements of a novel are present. But each scene was strangely devoid of this same structure. Each time I thought I was at the beginning of an interesting passage, it would end abruptly leaving me thinking that nothing had happened. If Sigerson had any description of environment, it was removed. We are expected to know what it’s like in London or New York or even the protagonist’s bedroom without any clues from the author.
So I ended up with a story about people and not places. This is not too much of a sin, but again this leaves me feeling a lack of depth and a lack of anchorage with any of the characters. And this is a sin, especially considering that so much of this novel/novella resonated very deeply with me. It’s a story that bears frightening resemblance to a mutant fusion of two of the significant break-ups in my life. Many of the details differ, but enough of the superficial details and enough of the emotional landscape described mirror what’s happened in my own head and heart that I’m tempted to mail a copy of this to my exes.
And that may be what bothers me about what I’ve described as a lack of depth. I don’t feel I really learned anything from this novel. I feel as though Sigerson brought me through territory I’ve been through without pointing out anything new. So I have a visceral connection with the narrative but the connection ends at identification. As the Rollins Band song Liar goes, «I’ll tell you things that you already know so you can say ‘I really identify with you so much.’»
A final note: this is a novel that deals with sexuality fairly frankly. It is one of the aspects that led me to pick it up; I was intrigued by the reactions of reviewers and wanted to know what all the fuss is about. Like a rubbernecker at the scene of a car crash, hearing that others were offended or titillated drew me in. I’m a bit disappointed to report that I was neither offfended nor titillated, but on reflection that is likely to Sigerson’s credit. Like other aspects of the novel, the descriptions of sex were without much depth or texture. They did successfully advance the themes of the novel, which is a lot more than most authors do with sex. Delicate readers should be warned that there are some explicit descriptions and mention of acts that go beyond what normally find their way into a novel, but if that’s what you read this for, you’ll be disappointed. As soon as I thought to be shocked, the scene was over. Like the rest of the novel’s scenes, the sex was treated frankly without buildup, tension, or resolution.
As a result, it’s possible to see the progression of the protagonist’s inner life and learn something about the other characters personalities through the ways in which they interacted sexually. Each scene tells the reader something about one of the characters. If the sex were more charged with energy, if the sex scenes were more interesting, it might be easy to lose this aspect of character development in the distraction of luridity.
I’m somewhat curious of what Sigerson will do next. This is an interesting freshman effort and if he can learn to give the reader more to grasp on to, he could be a compelling author.
