Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A very special, Dominick Dunne-like New York thriller, May 24, 2006
Isabel Simpson can't say she wasn't warned. John Vance, her close friend and very wise judge of character, told her: James Willoughby was trouble. Yes, James writes well --- Isabel can't stop reading his piece in the New York Times travel section. But John Vance is quite clear. James is "impossible to work with." He's from blue blood --- "tired blood." But Isabel is a publisher on the lookout for a writer with a unique voice. She calls James's agent to set up a lunch. And gets another warning: "Do you understand how impossible he is? I could barely find anyone to work with Willoughby and two thousand words. No one could survive him through the completion of a book." Despite all reasons not to do it, they meet at Orso --- because this is that kind of a New York book. That is, upper echelon. Powerful people. Insiders. But not, as in chick lit books, doing stupid things with brand names. These are serious people. Isabel, anyway. You don't get to be head of a publishing house --- even with a lot of luck --- at 28 without having a steely intelligence, a smart tongue and a ton of self-confidence. Like at The Lunch, for example. Isabel is way beyond witty. The dialogue is Edith Wharton on steroids: smart, fast-paced, dangerous. And mean. James is a callow user, a jerk on the make. And Isabel nails him. Crucifies him, in fact. It doesn't take long, just a few words, but they're the right ones. He's dead. She killed him. And then they get married. What? Yes. Married. By this time, Collinsworth has laid out James and Isabel's family histories and personal pathologies. And although you, the reader, are screaming at her not to do it, he won't change, he can't change, the romantic in you is saying, yes, go for it, maybe you'll shoot the moon. That question --- do we change when love strikes? --- is the engine of the book. It is the kind of question so first-rate it will survive second-rate characters and plotting. Happily, the characters are so wonderfully quirky they're far from second-rate; they're strange and creative and although they're not like anyone in your life, you care about them. About both of them. Until..... There is a murder attempt. I'm not spoiling the book to tell you. The book's opening line is: "Isabel couldn't remember why she tried to kill her husband....it might have been what he said." And that makes the book a thriller. A special kind of thriller. The kind Dominick Dunne writes. This is a debut novel? Ha. This is as good as books about New York careerists get. You're not standing outside, pressing your nose against the glass in this one --- you're in the room. And now you can't say you haven't been warned.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Perhaps I'm missing something, April 25, 2007
Eden Collinsworth's It Might Have Been What He Said begins with an arresting first paragraph: "Isabel could remember the precise moment she tried killing her husband. Strangely enough, she couldn't recall why." The lines suggest what sort of a story might follow: layers of mystery and deceit to be unwrapped, and pieces of Isabel's mental puzzle connecting to form a clearer image of the events that precipated the story's violent climax. But that's not what happens. The book tells the story of Isabel's marriage to James, an account that encompasses forays into their respective childhoods. Isabel's was something out of a gothic novel (so even the author tells us), with a distant father who communicated almost exclusively through New York Times clippings, an undemonstrative, mentally ill mother, and a by-the-book nanny. James is the scion of an aristocratic but money-poor Virginia family. James' principal problem is that he's fiscally irresponsible. Isabel's principal problem is James. Their marriage should never have happened, should not have lasted for as long as it did, and when it fails no one should be surprised. As for the book's first lines, their promise is never paid off: Isabel, as it happens, eventually regains her memory of the event without any trouble at all, and the attempted murder, when it's finally detailed to us, proves to be anticlimactic. Since it amounts to nothing in the end, it becomes apparent that Isabel's memory lapse is merely a device used to delay the narration of the dramatic scene. It's difficult to become emotionally invested in Collinsworth's story. That Isabel and James' marriage ends badly is hardly a tragedy. And Collinsworth's characters are not credible: James is impossibly egocentric and shallow, Isabel impossibly self-possessed (though not, admittedly, when she tries to kill James), and their son Burgo impossibly precocious. Here, for example, is a conversation between Isabel and Burgo when he was perhaps five or six years old: "'Can you think of fictional icons as symbols of something real?' Finally, Burgo decided to give his mother a graceful way out. 'Yes, I can think of other examples.' 'They are?' 'Well, Batman is fiction. Ulysses might have been real, but the Cyclops wasn't.' 'The waiter in the Greek coffee shop near my office has a kind of Cyclops unibrow,' said Isabel. She realized she was digressing when she saw her son's impatient look. 'I believe Ulysses was real. Ten years and countless hardships later, he was still trying to return to his wife. Women like to put men to the test, my dear. When your time comes--and it will, Burgo--try to do the right thing.' Burgo ignored his mother altogether. 'Even in our own family, there is fiction and fact,' he pointed out resolutely. 'Really?' 'Yes...you are fact; and Papi is fiction,' Burgo explained." There are also episodes in the book that have no apparent purpose--the family's brief move to Los Angeles, their problems with an (impossibly) unpleasant neighbor. Even Isabel's extra-familial relationships--with her colleague John and with reclusive literary agent Monina--add very little to the story. Collinsworth's book has garnered a good deal of praise--Susan Cheever alone calls it "thrilling," "compelling," "gripping," "readable," and "shimmering"--so perhaps I'm missing something. But I left disappointed.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Perhaps a good beach read (for the Hamptons set), June 14, 2007
This review is from: It Might Have Been What He Said: A Novel (Paperback)
This was an impulse buy for me - I was drawn in by the "something he said" psychological hook. Unfortunately, I wound up with the most irritating and exasperating novel I've read in years. Here are my problems with it: The milieu. If the thought of selecting a prep school for your child, renting a Paris apartment, or attending a gala fundraiser causes your pulse to quicken, this may be the book for you. If such matters are foreign to your experience or even strike you as irritating, you will *hate* this book. The plot. The attempted murder is really a cheap "hook" that has been inserted into an otherwise banal fictionalized memoir about a tempestuous marriage and divorce. When the event finally comes about it is laughable in its transparency and lack of consequence. (Googling "it may have been something he said" actually reveals a news story from 2004 that is a possible source for the conceit.) The writing. In the early chapters I was struck by the stiffness of Ms. Collinsworth's prose. Frankly, it gives the impression of someone just "banging it out" without much attention to style or craft. A random sample: "When the lentil salad was placed in front of Isabel, James observed, 'You're being very quiet, Madam Publisher.' If ever there were a sound of impending calamity, it resonated in those words." or, here's a good one, in the same mold: "'With a butcher knife,' had been the grisly reply. A prepositional clause isn't supposed to be able to stand on its own. This one could. This one drew strength from the still air surrounding it." Such pronouncements did nothing for me - they've got no rhythm, no snap. Rather than actually invent evocative images or dialogue, Collinsworth has to explicitly tell us that the things she relates are important. Ultimately, however, they are not. (The most extreme example of this "tell, don't show" strategy is in Isabel's first exposure to James's writing. A better author would have created fictional excerpts from James's piece, to show us exactly what it was that attracted Isabel. Collinsworth simply tells us that the essay is "unconventional and beautifully written," a fact which proves highly dubious as the story wears on and James proves to be both a heel and a failure.) Since the book is set in the literary world and meditates so fixedly on class, culture, and privilege, Collinsworth's failings strike me as particularly galling. Isabel repeatedly justifies her marriage to James in terms of their mutual wit, talent, and attractiveness. ("He was my intellectual counterweight," she says at one point.) This is the story some people tell themselves to justify simple greed, snobbery, and superficiality. Collinsworth seems similarly deluded about her own powers and the import of her tale.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
|
