Interiors

I’d like A Fortunate Age better if I’d enjoyed it less.
Yes, that will make sense. Keep reading.
Not being inclined to serious literature, I doubt I’d have picked up Joanna Smith Rakoff’s novel except that she’s an Oberlin College grad (so am I, though about 15 years preceding her) writing about Obies in New York just before and after the turn of the century. Sure enough, there’s a lot here that clicks with me, from details of campus life to campus politics (Oberlin’s radical left hasn’t changed much since I was there)—although there’s more that doesn’t, due mostly to the New York setting (the squabbling and status-comparing between friends from different neighborhoods might as well have been feuding Mongol clans as far as I was concerned).
Normally, I would have blamed my dissatisfaction when I finished the book on the fact that it’s serious modern literature; ripping into it would make me feel like those reviewers whose review of Game of Thrones amounted to “I hate fantasy fiction, so that proves it stinks!”
But the fact is, I was surprised how well I liked the first third of the book. Rakoff’s characters are interesting, the dialogue is good and the awkward interactions and bad-In-hindsight situations (one guy works in a company that obviously won’t survive the dot-com crash) make for good readings.
The last half of the book? Everyone’s depressed, nothing goes right (and not in an interesting way) and we get what felt like pages and pages of internal monologues from one miserable character after another. I will apply the rule I mentioned in my previous post and not try her second book.
This also made me reflect that long interior monologues are a tough trick for any writer. Short ones are useful for exposition, especially if they’re written with passion. Or if they’re advancing the plot, like a character putting together pieces of a mystery in your head. Fritz Leiber starts off Conjure Wife with a hook (the protagonist is snooping around his wife’s dressing room), then fills in most of the backstory with an interior monologue flashback and makes it work. Longer ones make the characters look like self-indulgent navel-gazers unless the writer’s a genius and most of us aren’t.
That being said, I concede personal taste plays a role here too. I’ve read lots of successful literary novels where characters spent lots of time in their flashback booth (as It’s Gary Shandling’s Show used to call it); I don’t find someone sitting and ruminating over their life for page after page even remotely interesting, but obviously some people do. So take my reaction to A Fortunate Age with a grain of salt.
But the book really was entertaining at the start and I’m still disappointed it didn’t stay that way.