One DNF, and one left in an airport in Liverpool, UK, these were books that simply did not land for me. I actually felt like All Fours’ narrator could have been the grown up version of the narrator from My Year of Rest & Relaxation – their dissatisfaction and ennui felt like the same flavour, to me.
It might be slightly ironic that in my own perimenopause, I lack the patience to connect with The Perimenopause Book. All Fours has its moments – there is definitely some familiarity in the feeling of being trapped or like life is moving faster than you have the bandwidth for, into a season you’re not prepared to embrace.
I have managed to avoid the protagonist’s well-drawn feeling that I’m so defined by motherhood that I’ve missed out on something intangible, though Mr GirlWhoGotOverIt has had bouts of it, as has his mother. I can’t say that the novel doesn’t tap into the “don’t give a fuck” middle aged attitude my sister and I have recently come into ourselves.
All of the good, however, is swallowed up by the black hole of selfishness and unlikeability of the protagonist. I don’t think of myself as someone who requires universally likeable lead characters, or a happy ending for every novel. My mother does – we just had this chat about how many books she misses out on, because she won’t read anything that doesn’t end well. I am fine with gritty reality, with unreliable narrators, with the missing person having been dead all along.
But I just could not stand this narrator. How much of your identity has to be tied up in your attractiveness, to send you on this sort of journey? How patient should I have to be with someone who both wants to blow up her life, and expects everyone to treat doing so as her right, eschewing consequences?
I pushed through to finish All Fours on a plane, and I’ve never been as happy to close a book, and open a new one. I left it on top of an ATM at the airport, and I don’t regret it.
I did not manage to finish My Year of Rest & Relaxation. After months and months of pretending one day I’d read more than two pages at a time, I finally asked That Guy at work, who recommended it to me, if it ever redeemed itself. “No,” he said, “it’s just more and more of the same. It’s an interesting experience.”
Not interesting enough.
Another self absorbed, unappealing narrator, within an absolutely exhausting narrative. I don’t think I was more than 20 pages in before I kicked this one to the curb, and every page was an effort. There was nothing for me to latch onto, nothing that made me care enough to continue.
I’m interested that both these books were about burned out women, and that I was trying to read them while burned out. I wonder if that impacted my experience – I didn’t want to see that despair reflected at me from the pages of the novels I was churning through to escape, perhaps? My mind flat out refused to entertain ways of coping with burnout that I wouldn’t condone for myself?
Regardless, and daring controversy (I know All Fours in particular has a lot of fans), these are my two worst books of the year. They’re both terrible; I hated them; fight me.
