To sum up, this was not for me! Move along if that’s enough for you. I have a lot of conflicting thoughts about this book and why it didn’t work for me, but after the great first several chapters, I quickly found myself souring on it.
The Names is literary fiction with a speculative twist: a woman named Cora has been tasked with registering her newborn son’s name, and the book splits off into parallel narratives with different stories created by her three different choices of name. In one, she takes the suggestion of naming him Bear, because her daughter thought it boded well for him, that the name suggested strength, cuddliness, etc. In the second, she names him Julian, a name she had selected for herself. And in the third, she does as her husband told her to do and registers him as Gordon, another Gordon in a long line of terrible Gordons in his family. We then follow all three parallel timelines through a handful of intervals up until 2022 (it starts in 1987).
I’ve got to bullet point the rest of this in order to organize my thoughts:
*It was apparent from the first full chapter that this book was not going to handle this premise the way I thought it would. I pictured more subtle ways the different names would affect the little boy. Instead, we immediately get SPOILERS the abusive father slamming Cora’s head into the fridge, and then murdering their neighbor when he comes by to help her, who he heard screaming for help. This means this entire timeline has no dad in it END SPOILERS. This threw me right away. It’s not really a function of the name itself, is it? It’s the dad being a jackass. Nothing to do with the name itself.
*So really what this book is, is three different ways the behaviors of Cora’s husband changes the rest of their lives. This was much less satisfying than what I’d been picturing in my head.
*I quickly lost interest in the book after my immediate curiosity had been satisfied as to the basic differences, again because the names had nothing do with it. Course was set in the first handful of chapters by daddy. I just felt absolutely no tension or intrigue.
*The different timelines seemed to be different to no purpose. I found myself wondering what the point of it all was, to the very end.
*I got really mad at how Bear’s storyline ended. Just SPOILERS a character death END SPOILERS for no real reason other than to tug on the reader’s emotion by SPOILERS killing off the readers’ favorite version of this boy END SPOILERS. Yes, real life has SPOILERS stupid senseless deaths END SPOILERS but this is fiction! This is the moment I decided to lower my rating from a full three to a 2.5.
There were other things that didn’t work for me, but those are the main ones. I should have known better that this wouldn’t be for me. I was expecting it to be more of a traditionally speculative book when really I should have just been expecting general fiction and all that comes with that. I don’t even really think it lives up to its lit-fic label. What larger meaning was being explored here? It felt like merely a glimpse into these people’s lives and the different ways they could have gone, and that feels really shallow to me.
Oh, well, on to the next book.
[2.5 stars]
