Jack cannot help himself. He cannot look away from his window that faces the apartment across the alleyway from his – into the apartment of a woman who has captivated his heart. Somehow, he has found himself in love with her, or at least with everything he imagines to be her. And when he meets her, months later, Elizabeth seems to be everything he dreamed she would be. They connect on an instinctual level, sharing their affinity for all things non-conformist, radical 90’s music and art, rebellion against capitalism, an overall cynicism toward traditional life. But as they age, they fall into patterns they never expect – marriage, parenthood – that challenge their prior efforts to shed their respective, traditional, pasts. And gradually, their pasts slowly seep back into their present, as a reminder of who they really are, at their fundamental truth.
I honestly had varying reactions to this book as I read through it. There some passages that I felt were so unwieldy and wordy that I felt my eyes glaze over – but then there were other entire sections that were so well-written and brilliant that I was so glad I read the book. Overall, I felt it was worth the read and that it had multiple messages that were important, but it was not without its effort.
There is tremendous symbolism here, so much to learn from these characters. Both Jack and Elizabeth come from families with deep pathology, and both raised with minimal affection or love. This void is apparent both in their inability to communicate effectively and/or honestly to each other, and in the absence of meaning in what each of them do professionally (Jack’s photography without taking pictures and Elizabeth’s use of only placebo to treat her clients). They deal in nothingness, as one character accuses them of – and this deeply resonates.
Where the narrative becomes onerous is in the occasional weedy explanations that feel like rabbit holes the author drags us down. For example, we are taught in mind-numbing detail about the algorithms of Facebook and how they operate to create the echo chambers we find ourselves in. And yes, it allows us to see just how Jack’s father, much to Jack’s chagrin, has become radicalized, step by step, committed to his conspiracy theories and deeply entrenched in a subculture of lies – but we might have learned this in a few paragraphs rather than a few chapters.
Overall, however, it is a clever story, with layers of detail and plot lines, interesting characters, and lessons to learn. Not a MUST READ, as I had been expecting, but it is a worthy read in the end, in my opinion.
kindread spirits 