Customer Reviews

Our Sometime Sister

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The young Norah Labiner has given us a novel about a first time novelist that has ironically damned itself with its own complexity. Her aspiring novelist, Pearl, makes all the mistakes an intelligent, hyperliterary, naive first novelist would make... but the mistakes are Labiner's intention. It is Pearl, not Labiner, who has created a "novel of promise, undone by ambition." Labiner, in turn, has created a book that just may be brilliant and is certainly extraordinary in its subject matter, its language, its humor, and its depth . It deserves much more than the casual reading most critics will give it.

The only review I've written after the number of ones I've read. This is one of the ones that you can't put down. Funny and moving and mindblowing. You don't want her pages to ever stop. Each character could be a book in and of itself. I highly highly reccomend this read!! Now I just have to wait for the next one . . .

OSS is certainly ambitious. Like a successful surgeon at a high-rise hospital, it operates on many levels: a novel wrapped in a novel, a first novel about a first novel, a novel where the "real characters" emulate the "fictional characters" who were based on the "real characters" in the first place. It's enough to make a reader wonder, "Who the hell is in charge here anyway?"

While the "meta" aspects of the novel are dense, interesting, sometimes befuddling, and ultimately successful in their attempt to question the nature of the fiction at hand, what makes OSS great is Labiner's active, spot-on, often funny prose (departure points include the dark humor of Nabakov, the word play of Joyce, Plath, Salinger, the incessant list-making of your obsessive-compulsive grandmother) and a cast of very accurate and memorable characters. My particular favorites are the brooding Winston Delacourt (a classic `80's darksider in the Joy Di! ! vision mold), and both Hugo Tappan (an aging alcoholic writer) and Hugh Denmark (Hugo's "Humbert Humbert" fictional counterpart). For a novel with a decidedly feminine perspective, the male characters are very strong.

Describe the book in a sentence? "A coming of age prep school novel about a precocious teenage girl which uses Hamlet as its main subtext". Sounds lame, right? (And I'm not talking about gold suits, friend). But OSS is no more "about" the aforementioned than Moby Dick is "about" a guy who's mad at a fish. Good books both absorb and transcend their subjects. Good writers use their subject merely as a means to an end, as framework in which to allow themselves to say what they are really trying to say. Labiner is already a very good writer who soon may be great. A novel of promise undone by ambition? How about a novel of ambition done up with Promise? Now that's a tasty muffin.

I read the first few lines again, but I have to put it down. It takes the air from inside me. I have to walk. I feel as though I am on the verge and each word is a precipice I am so anxious to leap from. Teeming with the mulitiplicity of being I am overhwlemed. I leave after the first few lines to savor over the next few miles of walking frantically the thoughts it has turned over me, exposing so many dark roots to the sun. The author never lets you know which of the narrative rides you are on, the same way in life we never whose stories we are telling: our own, our own authored by us, our own authored by us but told by another to ourselves. Superb new fiction, metafiction, and prose style. Makes you questions if we posess an authentic voice, and then get excited by the possibilities of that question, even if the answer is no, we don't.

Do you like your books smart, your peanut butter extra crunchy and your gin slightly warm? Do you like Robert Coover, William Gass, Calvino and writers who play with form and ideas like a dog with a bone? I do. I loved this book. It's brainy and funny, irreverent, sharp, sad, sexy and doesn't mind taking a chance or two. So Ms. Labiner may have a chip on her shoulder against the Western Canon. I dare you to knock it off!

Clearly beloved by reviewers, who were willing to take wordy, empty prose as mark of genius, this tiresome book was made barely tolerable by the movement from character to character in no definable order - and occasionally the characters were engaging for a few pages. The draw towards some kind of unifying conclusion or a return to those lucid intervals did carry me through to the unremarkable finale. Perhaps to those steeped in the English Lit department, the subtle references to classic novels would be enough to titillate, but as is I find this a definite first novel of an author who has promise that shines through in turns of phrase and character development, but whose verbiage and, perhaps, project for the novel overwhelm the end result.

All the characters in this book were so finely drawn, so human, that I was pulled into their overlapping lives as if by a string. The references to other literary works - Hamlet and Lolita in particular - made me feel as if I were reading a book that is connected to all other works of great literature. A strangely comforting feeling, and one that makes me deeply respect this author, Norah Labiner. Her language is seamless. She gets into this groove of writing and the reader is pulled along with her...I felt as if I were living inside each alternating narrator's mind and heart. A novel of promise, fulfilled by ambitious brilliance.

Labiner writes a complex, multi-layered novel that is surprisingly entertaining and funny. Although at times it is a bit confusing to keep track of the many characters, the novel is so compelling that one wants to get to know these people better. From the delicate Butternut to the main narrator (and herself an authoress) Pearl, Labiner has woven in a multitude of intriguing personalities. I found myself unable to put this book down! Our Sometime Sister would make a delightful beach read for the reader with a literary bent.

The inside cover sold me. Once I read half way through though, I was sure that I had picked a book with the wrong dust jacket. If you are soft to fiction about life in Michigan and the Upper Peninsula, this book is not for you. It is like a scavenger hunt, a constant search for clues, and answers. I didn't see the parallels at all. I read serious fiction, but this book is definately for readers of classic literature.