J. Robert Lennon - familiar

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Flawed but still very good

For a good deal of its length I thought this was a terrific novel, very well written and full of ideas and thoughtful insights. It petered out rather badly, but I still enjoyed it a lot.

J. Robert Lennon uses the notion of a woman quite suddenly translated into a parallel, slightly different version of her life to examine all sorts of things, so it's hard to say what the book is "about," but I thought it had very interesting and sometimes quite original things to say about relationships, being a parent, what genuine fulfilment is and isn't, and the impossibility of recreating the things we have lost in our lives. As an illustration, he has a fine understanding of the nature of bereavement and how differently it affects people - for example: "...[she had] no breakdowns, no fits of grief. She just bore the extra weight." It's a typical piece of pithy insight.

I found Lennon's style excellent. He writes in the present tense in a tight, unforced way with very few adjectives or similes and makes the prose really grip as the story evolves. I was utterly engrossed until the last 30 pages or so, when he suddenly seems to lose his assured handling of the story and get rather lost. I like that there are no easy resolutions or neat Life Lessons Learned anywhere in the book, but I found the culmination of the story very unsatisfactory, as though Lennon had followed his trail of ideas to a place which he can't see a way out of, and just fudges a mess to end the book. It's a shame, because it's very good up to then.

Plainly, many other reviewers here thoroughly disliked this book, but in spite of my reservations I would recommend it as a very well-written, rewarding and intelligent read.