Bingo Square: Wealth (there’s a bunch of super rich characters whose wealth and privilege is never truly reckoned with)
And the streak continues … I swear, I like reading and books but it is easier to articulate my thoughts on the ones that are flawed, and I do feel like I have been reading a larger than usual amount of books that aren’t working for me. Am I getting worse at picking books (this one was a book club choice, though), am I extra critical lately, are publishers just releasing anything without doing a second round of edits? Who knows!
I never got around to Where’d You Go, Bernadette back when that novel was everywhere and also didn’t watch the movie adaptation so this was my first Maria Semple. And I started out all in – a seemingly type A person who has her shit together, is over all that dating bullshit and creating a community for like minded women to support each other by living near each other, sharing those groceries that are just awkwardly proportioned for one person (who can’t relate) and sharing other services and subscriptions in a society built for couples.
Unfortunately, the first chapter or two are really the extent we saw of that part of the novel. It seemed a bit obvious that Adora was a bit pretentious and too stuck in her routine so I expected the rest of the novel to have her loosen up a bit and show her some of her misconceptions, expanding her world even more.
Instead, we end up focused on her work, her insta-love with a guy and a flashback to her late 20s that unfortunately illustrates how little she has changed even while she thinks she has found enlightenment. I would say about half the book club enjoyed the novel, with the rest being somewhere between it was fine/not for me. I probably had the most negative reaction because of how much I ended up despising Adora.
As I said, I started out enjoying it, even if it all felt very much like an adult fantasy/unrealistic: a middle aged woman with her own apartment in Manhattan, with a job as a private tutor to an ultra rich family. Just a very privileged life, and while there seemed at first to be a bit of a satirical element to how the author described the wealthy family, ultimately, it’s never truly grappled with. They’re just nice people. Who gives a shit that they got around loopholes about the conservation of their historical property by tearing everything but the facade down and rebuilding it? (So maybe I have too much of a “eat the rich” attitude lately to enjoy a novel with rich, benevolent patrons, especially if the so-called stoic philosopher never truly questions the wealth).
But more than the lack of dissection of wealth, my main issue is that Adora turned out to be a total pick-me, which felt like such a bait and switch after the promise of a coven.
About a third of the way into the book, the novel flashes back to the late 90s, when Adora is trying (and failing) to be a TV comedy writer. I know there was a lot of internalized sexism back then so for the most part, I didn’t judge Adora too harshly (I mean, I didn’t love that she referred to one location as “the place where Roman Polanski had sex with an underage girl” rather than “drugged and raped” but it was part of showing her attitude at 29 and the mindset of the ‘90s). She is so desperate for male approval around her that she disregards the women in her work place and lets herself be the token, the door mat, the excuse – “these jokes aren’t sexist or offensive, Adora didn’t mind them.” And then something bad happens to her (and she doesn’t deserve it) that changes her trajectory, leading her to philosophy and the life of stoicism.
The problem, unfortunately, is that for all of Adora’s talk of stoicism, an introspective life, and her community of women, she doesn’t actually evolve past the pick-me attitude of her late 20s (also, while I know it was the 90s, 29 isn’t 22 – she should have been old enough to know better when it came to some of her actions). She, a 57 year old woman in the year 2026, is flattered when a guy uses the line “not like over girls,” she is judgmental towards her “shallow” daughter, she loves her billionaire boss and his spoiled twin boys but seems pretty lukewarm on the wife, and then falls in insta-love with a guy and immediately agrees to do something for him that seems like it would be a pretty big conflict for her job. And she doesn’t even consider it a one-off, like “I dropped off a letter for him,” she fantasizes about reporting everything that happens at work on her employers back to this guy because he asked her and she is bored? Like none of her actions and thoughts make sense here.
Then we end up with a very slapstick and zany final third, which could have been entertaining but doesn’t really entirely fit with the rest of the novel and since I already hated Andora by this point, it was hard to enjoy it too much (plus there’s one plot point here that is just so random and weird, I mean you almost have to admire the idea but also just, what). So yeah, very much not for me. She finally has an epiphany of sort but it’s also not entirely enough and too late.
