Kind of like my review for 2666, this is going to be one where I have to sort of list my uncategorized scattered thoughts. I sat on this for 24 hours and I still don’t know the best way to talk about this book so here it goes…
-It took me four tries to read this. Why couldn’t I quit? My wife hate-watches the series. I walked in on her during a viewing and caught maybe fifteen minutes of it. It really helped me to understand the voice Caroline Kepnes was trying to create with Joe. Once I understood it, I was able to plow through and after the first thirty pages, I was hooked…
-Yet I can’t get this thought out of my mind: would I have liked this and stomached it if it were written word-for-word by a man? I don’t have a serious answer for that. Since it was written by a woman, I could read Joe’s voice as satirical, I could see how Kepnes was mocking male archetypes of all kind (the white knight, the good guy, etc.). But I don’t know if I would have let this book have its cake and eat it too if it had been written by a man. Apologies for the binarism. But I think there’s an interesting dilemma here and I don’t know how to sort it out.
-All I do know is that I could talk about this book for hours. Kepnes’ characterization, her use of irony, her hilarious skewering of upper class white people’s colonization of New York City…it wasn’t the book I thought it was going to be when I tried to read it the other three times. This is a high wire act that Kepnes pulls off with precision. I’m not sure a lesser author, regardless of gender or lack thereof, could do it.
-I don’t know how I feel about sequels. I really feel like this works perfectly as a standalone. But I will definitely read them. And I hope Kepnes writes other stuff outside of this series because she is a talent.
