I’m going to try and explain why I was so irritated with this, but I freely admit that it might just have been me. I’ve had some issues and frustrations this year with mansplainers… which may have contributed to just how much Hawley’s holier-than-thou, pompous tone resonated and irked me.
I was looking forward to this one, because I loved Before the Fall and Hawley’s TV work. But I was so frustrated and disappointed. There’s a glimmer of a great story here – but it needed a really strong editor, to excise the removal-of-the-fourth-wall conceit, and it didn’t have one.
The 9-11 books that worked best for me – like Dead Air – did so because they never lectured, never took an “I’m so disappointed in you” tone (even though by that time, minorities were being attacked both verbally and physically). Addressing a real life political landscape takes some finesse, and while I’m fine with authors taking a stand and condemning behaviour they feel strongly about, that wasn’t what I felt was happening here.
Mostly I felt like, for pages and pages at a time, all I was reading was “I am SO SMART. People suck and are stupid but I AM SMARTER!” To say I felt this was self indulgent was putting it mildly. And that sucks, because I can see what was being attempted, and I liked most of it. If you toned down or totally removed all the Party of Truth stuff, you’d have Station Eleven for the action set.
Instead, we’ve got a smug dude talking down to people. Post Covid, we all feel lost, we’re all stressed about our kids and the environment, but wrapping a screed in a novel is just kind of annoying – and I’m down with most of the points Hawley is making here.
The final note in my thumbnail from back in March: “Ugh, just read Station Eleven again, and maybe Reamde if you want some maths in there.”