Customer Reviews

A Taxonomy of Barnacles: A Novel

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(15)

 

 

I'm not a great writer, but in college I took some creative writing classes. In the classes, everybody had to read everybody else's stuff each week. Most of it was drivel, mine included. Aside from sharing a common thread of sheer awfulness, the writing also shared an affected fussiness. we all wrote like we thought we should write, or how our favourite author wrote. in the process, nothing we produced made sense, sounded real, or was very interesting at all.

you probably see where i'm going with this. i gave Taxonomy 50 pages. Facing another 300+, I kept asking myself, can it really be this bad? can the tone be this self-consciously pretentious, the sentences this schizophrenic, the diction this...plain wrong? Did anyone edit this book? did the author herself read her own writing? did she, in fact, pass 3rd grade?

doubting myself a little, and looking for a little confirmation, i sought any review i could find. On the New York Observer's website, author Anna Shapiro hits the mark dead on. I won't post her comments here, but please read her review before you consider buying this book.

http://www.observer.com/culture_books5.asp

I hate posting negative reviews, but I can honestly say Taxonomy goes down as the single worst effort by a first-time novelist that i've ever read.

"A Taxonomy of Barnacles" is supposedly a novel about nature versus nurture, taking its name from an early work of Darwin, and posing, in the background, the question of why Darwin, having developed his theory of natural selection in a study of barnacles, waited many years to publish it, and then focused instead on finches.

Thus, we have the contrast between the Barnacle family, a wealthy Jewish family whose patriarch made his money in pantyhose, and the Finch family, their WASPish neighbors who include a pair of identical twins. The book's introduction is well-written and intriguing, but from the start of the first actual chapter the book seems to have lost its way. Everyone in the Barnacle family has a first name starting with B, except for adopted Latrell, and they are hard to keep track of. Bell and Bridget and youngest Benita are pretty distinct, while the other three often go unmentioned for many pages. Bits and pieces are worthwhile, but the time scale is hard to follow, with some things seeming to go on forever while the book turns out to take place within a single week.

The supposed engine of the plot is a King Lear like promise by father Barry Barnacle to leave his fortune to the daughter who immortalizes the family name. Motifs of the importance of the right proposal (which I assume is the point other reviewers refer to as a shout out to Jane Austen), the similarities and differences between twins and siblings, infidelity, deception and identity switching fill the book.

Unfortunately, what does not fill the book is any sense of consistency.

The author can't make up her mind as to how identical the Finch twins actually are, just like she can't make up her mind as to whether Bella, the mother, breaks her leg (a plot point that just lies there) or it is merely a sprain. Within two paragraphs, Latrell has two different favorite places to hide (many of which are pretty hard to imagine actually working in 2006 in New York, such as hanging at the Guggenheim amongst the art after hours; does she think there are no motion detectors or cameras?). Yankee players have made up names; David Wells pitches for the Red Sox. Her basic understanding of baseball, despite the fact that it is mentioned over and over again, seems at about the level of the average American's understanding of English County Cricket. New Yorkers are not divided between fans of the Yankees and Red Sox, they are divided between fans of the Yankees and Mets. A grand slam in the bottom of the ninth when the team is four runs behind ties the game; it is not over.

Perhaps the strangest bit, though, is at the very beginning. Bridget's erstwhile boyfriend Trot, on whom she has been cheating in her heart with Billy Finch, is chided by her for having failed to bring cake to the family's Seder. He, not Jewish, failed to do so for the obvious reason that no one should bring cake to a ceremony where only unleavened bread is to be consumed.

I did laugh out loud at her making fun of my own surname on page 166. And at a few other points, which is why it rates two stars, not one. Benita is kind of fun and Beryl is rather sweet. Others have compared it to the Royal Tenenbaums (which I hated), but I think the sense of unreality and privilege comes more from Francis Ford Coppola's "Life Without Zoe", his generally unsuccessful contribution to "New York Stories". It too is a fantasy about privileged people that seems to assume that we should care about them, without going to the effort to provide us a reason why we should care.

I had to force myself to finish this book. Now that I am finished, I couldn't even begin to tell you what it's about other than an annoying family. It jumps all over the place and it's difficult to keep all of the sisters in order. Like others, I don't know how this book made it to print. I also found the constant use of the word "ennui" irritating. If you insist on reading this, don't buy it, get it from the library. It's not worth the money.

Perhaps the author is one of those New Yorkers who is so priveleged that she has only traveled around the city via taxi cab... at least she could have done a little research and looked at a subway map. She ought to know, if she is truly a New Yorker (and being a New Yorker I'm not convinced)- the D train does NOT stop at 59th and Lex, and the downtown 9 train goes down the west side and does NOT stop at Astor Place, which is an east side 6 train stop. For shame. Inexcusable errors about the city!
Also, as someone else here pointed out; "....if she had an editor wouldn't she have been told that if the Barnacles and the Finches share the top floor of their apartment building that Bella Barnacle cannot possibly live above them?" The book is full of sloppy details like these. And I have never seen such an extreme example of a book that tells, and never shows.
I am reading this book on vacation and I am planning to leave it behind. It doesn't merit the suitcase space to lug it home. Go see "The Royal Tennenbaums", the movie this book was clearly ripped from, which a far, far superior narrative.

It took me awhile to get into it at first. It's weird, and there are a lot of idiosyncratic characters to get to know before you can begin to care about them. Some are so real they are painful, and that's what makes them funny. If you're a complex person by nature then relating to them will be second nature. If you're not, you won't get the jokes. In response to other comments made I loved her writing style! Smart and beautiful.

"A Taxonomy of Barnacles," about six sisters --whose names all start with a "B"-- seemed like a quirky, different novel, so I picked it up at the bookstore without having heard or read anything about it. Well, talk about hate at first page. Niederhoffer's writing is terrible, her characters are pretentious and annoying, and the whole thing reads like the bad effort of a privileged high-school student who's been told she's so bright and precocious.

I don't know whose daughter/wife/friend Galt Niederhoffer is, but I am certain this book got published because of the author's contacts, not her talent, since unfortunately she has none.

I wanted to like this book. The premise was so interesting, even more so when I learned that the very unlikely family was similar to the author's. I wonder why the editor didn't catch the mixed metaphors, boring repetitions, and misused words on almost every page. I think we were meant to like this family, but were shown very little to like. The word sneered appeared over and over and sums up the way these very unpleasant people spoke to each other.I was fairly intrigued with the story but I gave up about 3/4 of the way through. It was simply unreadable.

I checked this book out of the library (fortunately for me it was a waste of time but not money) the day after reading a review that billed it as "a contemporary Jane Austen comedy of errors." After one hundred pages I am truly baffled. Apparently all a girl needs to do to be compared to Jane Austen these days is take on what is supposed to be a dry and witty tone, misuse her Harvard vocabulary and throw a ridiculous number of flat and indistinguishable characters at her plot. Ms. Niederhoffer thanks her editor on the acknowledgements page, but there are far too many stupid mistakes in her prose to convince me that this person actually exists. If she had an editor wouldn't she have been told that if the Barnacles and the Finches share the top floor of their apartment building that Bella Barnacle cannot possibly live above them? Or that if Bell and Bridget's going off to college coincided with the beginning of Belinda's wild streak that Belinda was an alcoholic eight year old? Or for God's sake, that it's 'couldn't care less,' not 'could care less'? This book is something that should have been shot down in its earliest stages. Take that, Claire Danes!

Clearly judging by the number of 5-star and 1-star reviews, this is either a love-it or hate-it book. I actually loved some parts of it and hated (REALLY hated) others. The number of errors in the book is truly staggering. The author must have thought it was clever to give everyone a name that starts with B, but if she can't even keep them straight then how does she expect the reader to? The baseball references are beyond laughable, at one point claiming Ted Williams played for the Yankees -- sacrilege!! The main characters aren't half as charming as they are intended to be, mostly coming off as overpriveleged snobs. I understand the author is trying to parody the upper class, but you have to make the characters at least a little bit likable. And the ending is a series of out-of-nowhere revelations that just sort of hang there.

That being said, there were enjoyable moments to be had. I thought the character of Benita was by far the most entertaining of the lot. There are some funny moments, but this book really could have been so much better if the rest of the characters resembled real human beings instead of caricatures.

I've given up after about 100 pages. The only reason I made it that far was it was the only book I took with me on a weekend trip! I had nothing else to do on the plane and kept picking it up, reading another few pages until I couldn't stand it anymore, putting it down to stare at the seat in front of me, and then repeating the process out of boredom. I agree with other reviewers that it has a lot in common with Royal Tenenbaums, which is a movie that I love. Reading about insanely quirky, rich, self-absorbed characters just isn't as amusing. The writing was mostly bad, the little literary references and tricks were too obvious, the characters were unlikeable, and it all seemed very self-indulgent.