12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
out of print genius, May 6, 2003
I'm currently reading An American Romance and will go from here to find anything else John Casey has ever read or touched. The book talks about the relationship between Anya & Mac and follows the flow of their lives with a generous intensity that it opens up horizons of emotion that are left out of most contemporary characters.
That said, it takes a while to fall in to. It's written with such attention and depth that I got lost a bit in the first few pages until I shifted into a kind of reading that isn't usually demanded by modern novels. There's so much interior detail here that I had to shift into Henry James mode, and having done that, I love this book. The characters are so well drawn, so rigorously plumbed, so wide, that they give me hope in a thousand unexplainable ways. For the world, for writing in general, for humanity, even. The way this relationship is described is so non judgemental and so intelligent that the novel reads as an implicit contradiction to the title, which implies a simple romance. The love here is brutal and open but above all invented, exploratory, and engaged- the extent to which the characters and the narrator avoid the obvious is almost heroic; in that way that heroism is usually mixed with a little numb stupidity.
I haven't read Spartina, and it took me a while to get into this one, but if you liked The Half Life of Happiness you will like this one. It seems like an earlier novel to me in many ways; the voice is more rangy and less structured and the ambitions, in a strange way, are more unchecked. The Anya character reads as a younger Joss in Half Life of Happiness, so if Joss irritated you in that book (she's not easy to tolerate from a moralistic point of view) she will drive you crazy here- but if you're reading for morals or adventure Casey's not the right person for you anyways. I am stunned that this book is out of print. It's great. It's totally intimidating and redemptive and inspiring and you should read it.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Not Spartina, but worth the time, September 25, 2009
This review is from: An American Romance (Paperback)
I picked up 'American Romance' after reading and loving 'Spartina'. 'Romance' is the sort of novel that isn't entirely enjoyable when you're reading it, but you find yourself unable to drop it until you've got to the end... and even then, the scenes and the characters stick with you.
The bad first: in places, this book is over-written. I'm ok with highly detailed, introspective novels, but 'Romance' goes a little too far down this road... Anya's (main female character) voice in particular shows a degree of self-awareness of self-analysis that's interesting and insightful, but entirely unrealistic as things are happening to her. Perhaps there are professors of English lit or Psychology who constantly evaluate their emotions, ambitions, impressions, motivations, but it doesn't seem entirely natural for Anya who is impulsive and driven by her passions in most cases. In contrast, Dick in 'Spartina' makes some interesting and morally questionable decisions, and he spends a good chunk of the novel sorting out why he did the things he did, but as things are happening his state of mind seems more natural and understandable. Parts of the novel drag; the beginning reads like a laundry list of Anya's sexual partners (11 in 50 pages by my count), and the focus of the narrative is lost for several large swaths of pages. Likewise, parts of the novel seem dated... whereas 'Spartina' is intentionally a novel about a specific time and place (and manages to include some more general insights), I get the impression that 'Romance' was intended to be a work about romantic relationships in general, but it gets a little lost in a bunch of characters and attitudes that belong in the 1960s.
That being said, this is well worth the read. In places, this book has flashes of brilliance... Mac and Anya are fully fleshed characters and they'll stick with you. I was disappointed with the direction their romance took towards the end (and especially upset with Anya's hypocrisy), but it's worth the effort, especially if you can convince your partner to read it with you. The novel is filled with sex from start to finish, but it's used effectively and reveals items that are important for the development of the story.
Recommended.
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