clew's reviews: a book log

@expectations, Kit Reed

I lost sympathy on the second page, when it became obvious that this was failing to be a Richard Powers novel. It would have been between The Gold Bug Variations and Plowing the Dark, only the characters are more predictable and less tragic, the prose more often falls out of alt into breathlessness, and theorems get name-dropped before any situation they could metaphorically be thought to describe is constructed.

It might have been choked at birth with chick-lit ambitions. I admit I suspect this partly because of the cover art, which looks like an ad for an online pregnancy test. The next suspect failing is that the female, lovestruck protagonist has a professionally competent history and no sign of being surprised that she's currently acting like such a goopy fool. I know that real people do this, hold all the cards but temporarily think like a fourteen-year-old, but I don't find it credible that they get all the way to the Learning and Growing stage without some amazement and self-recrimination for their own stupidity.

The last failing is an odd case of claiming something instead of writing so that it's obvious. The engine of the plot is a reckless romance in a MOO, and the credibility that someone could fall hopelessly in love in text is undermined by the slow, mechanical explication of exactly what gets typed, control characters and all. I think it would have been far more effective to have written the first MOO scenes as though they were materially real, because the story doesn't make any sense unless you believe that the characters experience the MOO as a heightened reality. Prose has better tools than a change in typeface and some @ symbols to indicate that.

This is a funny case of show-don't-tell because it's possible to literally show what the character would literally type, but doing so is what fails to show what we are told the character experiences. Possibly it was all meant to undercut our sympathy for the character, but nothing else suggests that this is so, including the reasonable and kindly ending.

ISBN: 0312874863