The Life We Bury
I hated this book. If it hadn't been chosen for my book club, I would have given up after thirty pages. But seeing as I'm organizing and hosting the book club, I couldn't just not read the book. So I powered through (frequently swapping to a different book for a break), and ended up with nice long list of grievances.
The broadest of those is that this book is lazy. The author relies overmuch on cliches and stereotypes. Worse, it seems obviously padded to hit a respectable 300 pages. But there were more than a few completely blank pages between chapters. I got the impression that he struggled to hit a minimum page count, which is a shame. There were plenty of places that the characters could have been better fleshed out.
The narrator, Joe, and his interview subject, Carl, are the only two characters who even come close to feeling like actual people. Which makes sense, since the book is basically about them. But even here there were some pretty big missteps. The author elected to use a first-person narration, and he tends towards purple prose. Neither of which really bothers me, especially in a thriller. I'm a huge fan of Tana French after all. But the narrator's voice didn't seem to match the protagonist - a 21 year old bouncer struggling through his first semester of college. I couldn't quite believe that this kid would talk this way. He was cynical enough, sure, but he didn't quite seem educated enough.
And I don't mean that to be a knock against the character or against uneducated people. He's just so young. And given what we know about his background, it didn't make sense for him to be talking like a forty-year-old college professor. Even in his head.
But then there were the other characters. Lila, the two-dimensional love interest who almost had a personality until it got subsumed by her role. The autistic brother who has no identity beyond that. The abusive mother who gets waved away as bipolar. The various victims, one of whom we get diary entries from. And they don't read like the diary entries of any fourteen year old girl I've ever known (and I've probably known way more than the author).
And so we come to my second complaint, the reliance of stereotypes, especially when it comes to mental illness. The author conflates bipolar with abusive and fails to give any other possible explanation for the mother's heavy drinking or her alternating neglect and abuse of her two sons. And then he makes the brother autistic without giving him any other personality or even a realistic set of symptoms. Jeremy basically just sits on the couch and watches movies and starts to get a bit anxious when things change. It's all so convenient and so he comes across as less a person and more a piece of baggage for Joe to haul around and feel guilty about.
On the subject, both Carl and Lila ought to be suffering from PTSD. Carl was a suicidal soldier in Vietnam who witnessed two rapes and ended up killing a superior officer. At one point he charges into a rain of fire, ostensibly to protect a fellow soldier. But he later admits that he just didn't want to go on living. Add thirty years of prison to that, and he should be a much more prickly person. Not just gruff, but actually fighting some internal demons. It's all tell, no show with him.
And then there's Lila, the next door neighbor/love interest. She was a party girl who was ultimately drugged and raped. But that just made her a little stand-offish and mostly exists as a reason for Joe to beat some dude up and then comfort Lila. Her trauma just exists to further Joe's character development and help him prove what a nice, stand-up guy he is.
That's my real problem with this book. It's the latest data point in a long history of men co-opting women's stories. There are eight female characters in this book, five of whom are raped. Three of them are never given a voice. Two don't even get names. But all the book cares about is that Carl was wrongly convicted of one of those rapes and Joe has made it his mission to clear this man's name. The story is about them when it should be about Lila and Crystal.
I don't know if there's a word for feeling both bored and offended at the same time, but that's what this book made me feel. I'm mad that I read it. But it should make for an interesting discussion at my book club, at least.
The broadest of those is that this book is lazy. The author relies overmuch on cliches and stereotypes. Worse, it seems obviously padded to hit a respectable 300 pages. But there were more than a few completely blank pages between chapters. I got the impression that he struggled to hit a minimum page count, which is a shame. There were plenty of places that the characters could have been better fleshed out.
The narrator, Joe, and his interview subject, Carl, are the only two characters who even come close to feeling like actual people. Which makes sense, since the book is basically about them. But even here there were some pretty big missteps. The author elected to use a first-person narration, and he tends towards purple prose. Neither of which really bothers me, especially in a thriller. I'm a huge fan of Tana French after all. But the narrator's voice didn't seem to match the protagonist - a 21 year old bouncer struggling through his first semester of college. I couldn't quite believe that this kid would talk this way. He was cynical enough, sure, but he didn't quite seem educated enough.
And I don't mean that to be a knock against the character or against uneducated people. He's just so young. And given what we know about his background, it didn't make sense for him to be talking like a forty-year-old college professor. Even in his head.
But then there were the other characters. Lila, the two-dimensional love interest who almost had a personality until it got subsumed by her role. The autistic brother who has no identity beyond that. The abusive mother who gets waved away as bipolar. The various victims, one of whom we get diary entries from. And they don't read like the diary entries of any fourteen year old girl I've ever known (and I've probably known way more than the author).
And so we come to my second complaint, the reliance of stereotypes, especially when it comes to mental illness. The author conflates bipolar with abusive and fails to give any other possible explanation for the mother's heavy drinking or her alternating neglect and abuse of her two sons. And then he makes the brother autistic without giving him any other personality or even a realistic set of symptoms. Jeremy basically just sits on the couch and watches movies and starts to get a bit anxious when things change. It's all so convenient and so he comes across as less a person and more a piece of baggage for Joe to haul around and feel guilty about.
On the subject, both Carl and Lila ought to be suffering from PTSD. Carl was a suicidal soldier in Vietnam who witnessed two rapes and ended up killing a superior officer. At one point he charges into a rain of fire, ostensibly to protect a fellow soldier. But he later admits that he just didn't want to go on living. Add thirty years of prison to that, and he should be a much more prickly person. Not just gruff, but actually fighting some internal demons. It's all tell, no show with him.
And then there's Lila, the next door neighbor/love interest. She was a party girl who was ultimately drugged and raped. But that just made her a little stand-offish and mostly exists as a reason for Joe to beat some dude up and then comfort Lila. Her trauma just exists to further Joe's character development and help him prove what a nice, stand-up guy he is.
That's my real problem with this book. It's the latest data point in a long history of men co-opting women's stories. There are eight female characters in this book, five of whom are raped. Three of them are never given a voice. Two don't even get names. But all the book cares about is that Carl was wrongly convicted of one of those rapes and Joe has made it his mission to clear this man's name. The story is about them when it should be about Lila and Crystal.
I don't know if there's a word for feeling both bored and offended at the same time, but that's what this book made me feel. I'm mad that I read it. But it should make for an interesting discussion at my book club, at least.
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