Monday, July 23, 2012

Gossip

AUTHOR: Beth Gutcheon
PUBLISHED: 2012
GENRE: Fiction

This is what Amazon had to say about this book: “Gossip is a tale of intimacy and betrayal, trust and fidelity, friendship, competition, and motherhood that explores the myriad ways we use and abuse "information" about others—be it true, false, or imagined—to sustain, and occasionally destroy, one another.”

Ummmm… maybe I accidently read a different book.  Maybe someone at the library switched the dust jackets on me.  But let’s put it this way: remember that time your best friend Jessica roped you into going with her to her grandma’s house upstate, but once you got there, Jessica totally ditched you for her cousins and left you to listen to her very sweet but kind of lonely grandma’s life story?  It was an okay story, with some interesting bits - you could tell she was probably pretty fun at one point - so you managed to keep your listening face on the whole time, but you were still pissed on the way home?  That’s exactly what this book is like.   

Gossip is the story of Loviah French.  Loviah seems like a very nice woman.  An uninteresting woman, but a nice woman.  Loviah’s narration begins in the present with a titillating tidbit of something juicy* and then goes back in time to Loviah’s first days at boarding school.  It’s at boarding school that she meets the other central characters of the story, Dinah and Avis.  Together they grow and mature, building families and careers, encountering setbacks and experiencing the wonders life has to offer.  Sound boring? That’s because it is.  It tries to be exciting – the Manhattan high life!  Fan-cy! – but no amount of talk about exclusive society clubs and martini-drinking, Pucci-wearing Upper East Side hostesses can combat multiple chapters about the inner workings of the personal stylist’s booking system at Bloomingdale’s, or, worse, the long conversations between Loviah and Avis about how maybe Avis should take a cottage on the Maine mainland instead of an island because, you know, her hips just aren’t the same anymore.  Add to that pages and pages of Loviah playing peacemaker between Dinah and Avis – or, really, justifying Dinah’s bitchness towards poor, bland Avis**.  It’s fascinating.  NOT.

Like a pair of Iowa tourists on their first trip to Times Square, the story wanders aimlessly forward in time until we arrive back at the present and at the horrific event first introduced 200 pages before.  When the BIG SURPRISE! finally comes, and Dinah’s son Nicky finally murders his wife – who also happens to be Avis’s daughter – it’s a welcome end to the slog (and to poor Grace).  And as you could probably guess, the BIG SURPRISE! isn’t much of a surprise, since the couple has been miserable for years.   But then again…everyone in this book is unhappy.  Dinah worries she’s too fat and she isn’t important to society anymore.  Avis has a bad relationship with her daughter.***  Loviah’s boyfriend isn’t around as much because his invalid wife suddenly decides to move back up from Florida.  (Even before that, Loviah always seemed slightly peeved with society for having to sneak around.  Keep in mind, this guy is in his 70s.)  With all this lingering hostility, it’s a wonder someone hasn’t killed before. 

In between all this are various detours, some of which reappear, some of which are never referenced again. These  detours, which presumably are meant to add meaning to it all, instead just add to the irritation.  Nicky kills Grace because she’s cheating on him.  But the author has also been hinting that Nicky is really gay for like, 150 pages.  So… is that supposed to have something to do with him killing her?  Was it really resentment about lost opportunities and the life he was supposed to lead?  (Note to Ms. Gutcheon: it’s never a good sign when the reader is left trying to scotch-tape together random bits of the story.)  A few chapters before, the story is moving along with some speed when September 11th happens.  The author shoe-horns it in by having Dinah’s ex-husband have an office in the towers, but there is no reason to reference September 11th other than to be able to say, see?  It’s New York.  They’re New Yorkers, which is completely unnecessary and totally jarring, especially when she doesn’t reference any other such historic happenings. It’s just all over the place.

Then there are the moments where you almost wonder if the whole stuck-with-Jessica’s-grandma feeling was intentional – times when Loviah is in the middle of a story and the author stops the forward momentum to have Loviah tell the reader, “it was 1956.  I just got out my yearbook and checked” or “I found the ticket stub just the other day.  It was in my winter jacket”.  After that, you expect a pat on the hand and an offer of a cookie.  The point of this all is, it’s not a bad story per se.  It’s just a lot to try and stay interested in, especially when there are no cookies, and no Jessica to be peeved at on the way home.

LENGTH: 288 Pages
MAINSTREAM OR NOT: It’s a new category: old lady lit!
SO, SHOULD I READ IT OR NOT?: Not unless you really liked those trips upstate.

*Well, it’s supposed to be titillating and juicy. But really it’s just vague.

**Because back in boarding school, Dinah made some minor social faux pas and Avis saw it.  She didn’t say anything about it, mind you, or ever tell anyone about it.  But Dinah hates her nonetheless.  What a pleasant character she is!

***Primarily because when Grace’s miserable drunk of a father finally keels over in his recliner, nobody called her up at school for a couple of hours.  This ruins her already strained relationship with her mother, who, by the way, has wordlessly put up with the drunk for like, 25 years, so maybe we should cut her a little slack?

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