I’ve begun “the Air we Breathe”, which I got from LT Early Reviewers.
When I first picked up the book and began to read, I was in love. The setting of the scene in the first pages had that strange power of really good opening lines; as I read the first words, I felt myself flying down over the setting like a bird, viewing the scene from above just as the author wrote it. I have a penchant for novels that begin this way- starting with the landscape in which the events are set. The effect can be too heavy-handed, sure. But when it is well-done, everything just seems to flow out of the setting completely naturally. And that was how I felt about the book for the first 50 pages or so.
I liked the third person narration, too. I went to a small girl’s school for 13 years, and I recognized the voice as one I sometimes have used. At the time I would have said that everyone was an individual and that, although there were cliques and factions, we didn’t all feel one way together. But when I tell M stories about those days, I find myself using a similar “we”. “We all thought that she had done it”. “we used to do this silly thing in the locker room after classes ended”. Was there really a “we”, then? Or is time just amalgamating myself and all the other girls into one being in my mind? Do I just say that because it makes me feel like I belonged to the group (which I seldom felt at the time)? So I can feel the comfort of the voice Barrett uses. And I found it very interesting when the voice broke up. At the beginning of one chapter, they say, “some of us want to say one thing, and others of us want to say another” (that’s a paraphrase, not a true quote). I’m curious to see if this voice goes unchanged throughout the book, or if it will be challenged.
I said that this is how I felt for the first 50 pages or so. Now that I’m over the initial infatuation of the beginning of a good book, I’m into the (sometimes hard) work of getting through everything that happens before the climax. I’m not enjoying it as much as I was. The neat narrative voice has become commonplace, and I feel like I can see just where everything is going. Sure, I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen which each plot, but I feel like everything is going to come to a fairly predictable crisis, and then people will go on, most of them alone and relatively unhappy, some satisfied with the things that happened. And no big truths will be revealed.
I seem disenchanted with the “whimper” that ends most contemporary literary fiction. I’m of the opinion that “literary fiction” is just another genre, like mysteries and epic fantasies. And I have to say, I feel a little like I did when I decided to finally read Jordan’s “Wheel of Time”. In the first volume of that series (as I’m sure many people know), a young man and his father (? - perhaps some other elder figure) head off on a journey to another village or something. The young man is inexperienced and excited about seeing more of the world. They encounter these mysterious and somewhat dangerous entities, “dark ones” or “others” or some other kind of creature whose black hood covers their faces, or who have skeleton hands coming out of their sleeves, or something. They get out of the encounter unscathed, and as they continue on their journey, it becomes clear that the father/elder knows more about these creatures and the whole situation than the young man does. And at that point, I just had to stop. It was too too similar to a dozen stories I’d read before. This is an archetype that I often like, but when you read a story and all you experience is the archetype and there’s nothing unique about this particular telling, then you may as well read a folklore dictionary. So anyways, what I’m saying is that all of a sudden, while reading “the Air We Breathe”, I had a premonition that the last paragraph would involve [male character] watching [female character] walk slowly up the road towards [dwelling place] and then heading to the [mass transit port]. Or possibly [female character] watching [children or group of friends] [playing or recreating] on the [lawn, beach, park], then silently turning around and [starting supper, pouring a glass of water, wiping kitchen counter].
I mean, am I totally off here? Of course, this particular book could surprise me. And this has a lot to do with the “reading mood” I’m in. But as far as the tropes of the contemporary novel, does this ring true? Seriously, leave a comment.
Thanks for reading!
