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166 of 172 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
An Overwrought First Novel, June 1, 2010
This review is from: Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel (Hardcover)
Hamann has set the bar very high for herself in her first book: to blend "Catcher in the Rye" with "Portrait of a Lady" for the generation of women who fall between the cracks of Boomers and Gen Xer's. Since I also happen to be in that category, and since the book came highly recommended by Very Short List, I was intrigued and bought it. And I admit that I was sucked into the romantic tangle she devises for her heroine, Evie Auerbach, reading to the end ("crack"-like, I suppose) to find out how the relationships would resolve.
There is good writing here, and some very good plotting. But there is also much mediocre writing -- way too much -- that bogs the book down and lead, at least for this reader, to a lot of page-skimming. Hamann has written a book about a solipsistic, depressed, angsty, and tragically hip teenager -- a girl who sees herself as an alluring enigma -- and has put every solipsistic, angsty, depressed thought this fictional character every conjured onto the page. And she has done it without any humor or perspective, taking her self-dramatizing teenage heroine at face value; otherwise, how to justify sentences like "We were both our essential parts; and yet, for all that we were, we were nothing that we were not" (what does that even mean?), or "In the mirror we were enigmatic, my eyes so tragic, my dress so low..." or even "it's exhausting to give up the past as I do, as I have done" (uttered by a teenager, no less)? Nearly every page is littered with this kind of sophomoric, faux-philosophical writing. No metaphor or simile goes unexpressed and, worse, no real flaws accrue to Evie Auerbach who, by her own reckoning, is beautiful and tragic and innocently seductive to all men and disdainful of almost all women... even her best friend Kate, who, by the end of the book, has been treated with such short shrift it raises the question of why these two girls were friends to begin with. The male characters exist mostly to swoon and pine and lust after Evie, to protect and defend her, to rhapsodize about her natural wonders. This is not Holden Caulfield or Isabel Archer territory; Evie, far from being an outsider to her own experience, is the dull dead-center of it.
My hat is off to Hamann for writing her first novel and getting it out there, to acclaim no less. She can spin a bodice-ripping romance and is a sensitive observer with an eye for details and an ear for dialogue. But I felt this book needed much more fully realized characters and a truly merciless editor to live up to the hype.
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78 of 80 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Book About A Girl, April 26, 2010
This review is from: Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
If J.D. Salinger and Jane Austin had a love child, it would likely have been Hilary Thayer Hamann. This is a coming-of-age book, a book about the transformative power of love in an era of deceit, and in many ways, it's a "retro" book.
First, it's instructive to mention what the book is NOT: it's not about grand themes or convoluted messages. It's not about the plots that normally sell -- mysteries, thriller, tabloids themes and the like. What it IS at its core is a book about one girl, Eveline Auberbach, as she navigates her early adulthood. Eveline is set in bold relief against three men who will factor largely in her life: the tortured and self-destructive Jack, her first boyfriend...the moneyed and morally corrupt Mark, who will woo her...and the love of her life, Harrison Rourke who will bring her to the edge of the foreign land of loneliness. The loneliness is defined as "the panic, the sweeping hysteria that comes not when you are without others, but when you are without yourself, adrift."
The anthropological artifacts of America are scattered throughout the book--the khakis, loafers and Lacoste shirts, the songs that defined the times, the cars, the furnishings. But the book is more about emotions than it is about the outer world. Evaline -- who must pick her way through the debris of divorce, death, love, passion, unbridled sexuality, and greed -- says about herself: "I was an American girl; I possessed what our culture valued most -- independence and blind courage...My days were simple, numb and narrow. My impressions collected in layers like generations of rock beneath earth, impacted to form a single idea -- that I was happy."
But IS Evaline happy? At the beginning, her voice is vivid and pure and hopeful. And later? She begins to shut down. Her voice becomes more staccato and she turns her back on conscious living. She starts to settle with her life and fade into emotional detachment. She REPORTS about the world rather than take pleasure from it; the tone is meant to discomfort the reader and it succeeds. As a result, I found myself skimming for several pages. At one point, Evaline reflects, "I can think only of fog, of being consumed by fog, so much so that it appears as though nothing is out there, but everything is out there, brushing by, inches off. You're powerless to correct your restricted perception, so you surrender to blindness. You survive by touch. You reach to know, reach to feel. You learn to live by sensation...there's no poetry there..."
How Evaline gets her groove back -- how she becomes restored through the healing power of love -- is a journey that I do not wish to spoil for the reader. Suffice to say that she does. One of the weaknesses of the book -- from my perspective -- is that Evaline must play off others to truly be transformed, rather than discovering it alone and for herself. Still, when Evaline muses, "How resourceful to turn a story of achievement into a more familiar one of loss...Had I been working all alone to secure my own failure, to collapse the machine that was made of me?", it becomes evident that her perceptions will lead to resilience and she can and will survive.
One important factor to note: this author originally self-published this book to avoid its commercialization and of losing her own artistic voice. She later totally rewrote the book; I've read the first 20 pages of the original, and the new book is almost completely reworked. This review pertains to the latest version.
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66 of 73 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Overwrought and Under-edited..., June 8, 2010
This review is from: Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel (Hardcover)
Wow. After a lot of skimming, groaning, and perseverance I finished this book. I was really looking forward to this one, given all of the rave reviews, and am scratching my head now trying to figure out what the h*ll just happened. First, the good stuff: the book is compulsively readable for the first several hundred pages. After that, it becomes compulsively skimmable.
At 600 pages, it's hard to believe that the entire plot involves the details of our miserable heroine's passive and angst-ridden journey through three relationships (one in high-school, one in college, and one post-college). Towards the beginning of the book, Evie is painted as an independent, thoughtful, tortured outcast (by choice), which I think may be the impetus for comparisons to Holden Caulfield? The problem is that this character does not develop - at all. As the story progresses, Evie seems more and more like a caricature, and an unlikeable one, at that. She is described as irresistible to all men, with her tragic eyes and waif-like appearance. It is mentioned throughout the book that she does not eat and people are constantly expressing concern over her "skin-and-bones" appearance and her pale, translucent skin. Of course, this only makes the men in the book (ALL of them, seemingly!) want to rescue her from herself all the more! And the beauty of it is, she lets them! As far as I could tell, she never actually does anything in the entire book besides bounce from man to man, talking about how tortured she is along the way (if I'm over-using the word in this review, it's only because the sentiment is so over-used in the book). She wallows in her angst over the break-up of a relationship with a (surprise!) tortured, artistic man, Rourke. Although we never get shown any reason for their transcendent connection, we are told repeatedly that theirs is a deep, tortured, predestined love. Take this description of Rourke's eyes as Evie sits next to him briefly before a school play: "His eyes were black; it was true. Eyes can be called black, but I didn't think eyes could actually be black. Rourke's were a reverberant black, a blackness of conviction, as if they had forfeited subordinate hues by decision, as if they were that way by will. They were the eyes of someone who reads the world in terms of opposition. And yet there was light. I could see where they were susceptible. I could see blind pools where the light hit and bounced back. Then, quick as it came, the light was gone, replaced by a cataract of grave insights" (p. 187). This isn't a quote taken out of context; every page - nay, paragraph - is swollen with overwrought metaphors and pseudo-philosophical musings. It's like writing bad poetry in high school or painting your room black and agonizing over how misunderstood you are - don't we all go through that, to some degree?
Okay then, if that's the case, it could be argued that this book brilliantly captures the melodramatic essence of the transition from adolescence to young-adulthood. I could buy this if the author seemed to have any perspective on this at all. Instead, the book shares the same flaws as the heroine: melodrama, self-indulgent angst, and overwrought metaphors are mistaken for substance and depth. I know people will disagree with my review of this book, and that's okay; I actually didn't hate it or dislike it as much as this review might suggest. I was ultimately so frustrated with both the heroine and the author and the solipsistic nature of it all that "compulsive readability" just couldn't begin to redeem the book.
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