Customer Reviews

My Life, Starring Dara Falcon

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3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(2)

 

 

Why did this stellar author write this insipid book? I could not relate to any of the numerous, vapid characters whose names and importance quickly escaped my memory and left me wondering time and again: who is he? who is she? And why am I trying so hard to like this book?

This is a great book from Ann Beattie. It touches on many themes: friendship, betrayal, the safe but static family lives of people etc. But ultimately it is the narrator as well as the reader's fascination with Dara Falcon that propels us deeper and deeper into this 'web' of events. The larger than life portrayal of Dara Falcon is believable and a terrific accomplishment for the writer. Read this book.

I am an avid reader of the works of Ann Beattie, and I couldn't wait for Dara Falcon to come out. I was incredibly happy with the book. The complexity of Beattie's characters and how intricately interwoven they are in the lives of one another never ceases to amaze me.

True, I haven't read James Frey, but this book must be up there. I first read it when it came out, when I was being paid to review it for a magazine. Recently I read it again, just to see if it would still make my 10 worst list. It does. It's hard to know where to start.

The plot, if you must: A young woman, Jean, is living in rural New Hampshire in the 70s with her husband Bob (called "dull" by one reviewer, but with more energy than most of the characters, including his wife) and his family. They work at the family's nursery, have family dinners, and family squabbles. Delightful. In moves Dara Falcon, a transparently silly drama queen. Every high school has one, and they're usually involved with the theater, like this character. Dara fibs about everything, dreams of being an actress, creates whirlwinds of intrigue (for the fictional town of "Dell," anyway; her machinations will strike most readers as ridiculous), and eventually sleeps with Jean's beloved brother-in-law, Frank. This comes back as a key plot point later, although it really doesn't create any dramatic tension or interest. Idiocy follows: Tom Van Sant, Dara's squeeze, gets another woman pregnant; Jean decides to leave her hubby and study literature at U-Conn; Dara gives her a ring that belonged to Tom's mother; Dara leaves Dell for New York; Jean gets a new boyfriend, and--oh, my head aches. Along the way there's also some bizarre subplot about a manuscript that Jean types and is turned into a play starring Dara. Later, Jean meets up with her husband and he reveals a terrible secret. The secret? Dara was supposed to type it first! Oh no!

There are also a lot of mistakes, as in authorial--for instance, you cannot teach college English, even at a community college, with just a BA. And "James Kames" is the stupidest character name I've ever seen outside of a comic book. ("Liam Cagerton" is pretty bad, too. And there is no such word i n the dictionary as "meepy," an adjective used to describe one of her housemates. I checked--something Beattie's editor should have thought of.

This book is an insult to one's intelligence, mostly because it's just so lazy. Beattie fakes action by piling on incidents in which characters appear to communicate, mostly by reciting banal dialogue. Occasionally there's an encounter which is supposed to be meaningful, such as when Liam, Jean's first beau after Bob, describes a bizarre encounter he has with Dara. She acts for him. He refuses to turn on the tape recorder. They sleep in the same bed because, as he says, "It's my bed, I sleep in it." Jean gets really, really mad. There's another scene when Jean's sister-and-brother-in-law try to convince her to return the ring. Tears all around. Jean no like that. (Although these characters use the expression "put out" a lot.)

Finally the aforementioned brother-in-law gets killed driving drunk. Jean realizes that everything Dara ever said to her was a lie. (Jean's not too bright; the dimmest reader would have guessed it about 15 pages into this tome.) She drives to Provincetown to confront her and tells her of Frank's death. They cry. Jean has some epiphany while standing on the beach with her dog. Then it wraps up by Dara dying of cancer and Jean marrying a hotel manager who wants her to be "normal." The narrator goes to great lengths to tell us how much John, spouse #2, wants her to be "normal." The first time I read this book, I wondered if this tribute to shallowness was some way of indicating to the reader that Jean really hadn't progressed that far. I decided that I was giving Ann Beattie way too much credit. I assumed the title was ironic and that Jean would eventually come into her own. At the end of the book, rather, she's reading Dara's obit at a hotel in Key West as a glorified housewife. Call me crazy, but that doesn't seem like progress.

It's hard to know what to make of this mess. Perhaps I'm so angry because there IS potential in this story. We've all known Daras, and a book that really saw through one would have been fascinating. What happened that made Dara the way she was? Original sin? We never learn. This book is awful, and an awful disappointment.

My book group was very disappointed with this book. Although the premise and the character's dilemma were interesting and thought-provoking, they felt the book needed more momentum. I was glad to see that Jean finally realized her own worth; but somehow it was hard to feel lots of empathy for her.