Casandra Fruge Fruge থেকে Wapienne, Poland
This was the first Ann Tyler book I've read, and I really wanted to like her writing. After all, her strengths are characterization and relationships, and I love well-drawn characters. (For good characters, I can even forgive lack of plot.) The book started out well enough, and the emotions and thoughts of the characters really rang true. However, the longer the book went on, each family member's story began to seem more pointless to me. But by then, I was already fairly invested in the book.) Also, I felt as though the author was beating the reader over the head with her metaphors. Just too much explanation. She didn't give her readers enough credit for figuring out where she was going and showing us her meaning .... she insisted on telling us. For instance, I understood that the very "gray" eyes of some of her characters meant that there was a lot of good and bad in them - that nothing in their lives or in their actions was black and white. She didn't need to spell that out in the closing pages of the book, when Pearl's husband expounds to his son about the "grayness of things," the "half-right-and-half-wrongness of things." This is just one example of what I consider overwriting. Spoiler Alert: She also ruined it for me with continually "telling" the reader the reason that Cody was relentlessly pursuing his brother, Ezra's, girlfriend. I think most readers who were paying attention could easily gather the reason, and it was annoying to have that explained (more than once). I also didn't think that the expository dialogue of some of the characters was believable. The most egregious example of this is in the chapter dedicated to Luke. Why in the world would not only one, but a whole series of adults spill their guts out to a 14 year old kid in the course of one day? It just seemed ludicrous to me. The way that Cody (Luke's father) continually reveals his grudges and private thoughts to his teenage son seemed silly. I think I'm probably in the minority, but if this is an example of Ann Tyler's writing, I'm surprised that she won a Pulitzer.