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Books: The Borrower, Rebecca Makkai
Jan. 7th, 2013 10:41 pmThe Borrower, Rebecca Makkai (fiction, American picaresque).
I should't like this book. I mean that I ought not to like it. By that, I mean that there is a moral (or maybe an aesthetic) criterion by which I should find this novel wanting: an idealistic young librarian, recently out of her East Coast liberal arts college and minding the children's desk in a small-minded red-state town in the Bible Belt -- are your hackles up already? This is unfair representation, elite stereotyping, a snooty liberal disdain factory manufacturing progressive pablum. Aren't we obligated to be above all that? Book-burning bible-thumpers are kind of trite, after all, especially when they're also Stepford-ly suburban. "People are always more complicated," "you don't even know their hopes and dreams", "individuals," etc.
You know all this. I know all this. Rebecca Makkai knows all this, and even her heroine Lucy Hull, that aforementioned nice liberal idealist (put on your cynicism glasses -- now), learns it, sort of. And yet sometimes, you want something comforting, like the children's section of the library before all the complications of "Middle School" and "YA," back when there weren't any sequels to The Giver and "Junie B. Jones" was the stupidest trend in beginning chapter books anyone could think of, and you didn't have to worry that maybe you were imposing your socio-culturally hegemonic (not to mention historically specific and relative) progressive values on decent people if you kidnapped their precocious and charismatic 10-year-old son just because they censored his reading and were preemptively sending him to anti-gay weekend school, where there was no evidence of abuse or actual harm, just objectionable child-rearing choices (and everyone needs to be free to make their own choices, don't you know?).*
Obviously, the post-modern door can't be closed, and even if I only read The Giver and Gathering Blue, the other two books will always be out there and there's no going back. Sometimes, though, a fantasy about picking up and leaving your boring tedious compromised life to dodge the police on a wacky road-trip after making a snap and probably-bad decision to make a grand noble gesture and save that precocious, funny, excited kid from the stifling influence of his parents, is exactly what one wants. Okay, so the literary references and the librarian-angst are a little tiresome after a while, and the tone hovers anxiously between earnest and painfully self-conscious (but whose doesn't, these days?), and I don't even know what to do with the Soviet Russia/Russian Mafia finding-your-identity subplot.** But I was completely hooked, completely taken by Ian, completely involved in Lucy's zany adventures, and completely entertained for a couple of hours.
CONCLUSION: Would recommend, but only to a certain kind of person.
*I do think it's significant that the Drakes and their pastor are in no way portrayed as heinously evil, just as creating a small-minded warped environment that will ultimately probably harm their son. But don't worry -- Lucy has to interrogate her assumptions, too, at some point.
**One practical thing it did was smooth over the plausibility holes. The fact that they were smoothed over may be a weakness.
I should't like this book. I mean that I ought not to like it. By that, I mean that there is a moral (or maybe an aesthetic) criterion by which I should find this novel wanting: an idealistic young librarian, recently out of her East Coast liberal arts college and minding the children's desk in a small-minded red-state town in the Bible Belt -- are your hackles up already? This is unfair representation, elite stereotyping, a snooty liberal disdain factory manufacturing progressive pablum. Aren't we obligated to be above all that? Book-burning bible-thumpers are kind of trite, after all, especially when they're also Stepford-ly suburban. "People are always more complicated," "you don't even know their hopes and dreams", "individuals," etc.
You know all this. I know all this. Rebecca Makkai knows all this, and even her heroine Lucy Hull, that aforementioned nice liberal idealist (put on your cynicism glasses -- now), learns it, sort of. And yet sometimes, you want something comforting, like the children's section of the library before all the complications of "Middle School" and "YA," back when there weren't any sequels to The Giver and "Junie B. Jones" was the stupidest trend in beginning chapter books anyone could think of, and you didn't have to worry that maybe you were imposing your socio-culturally hegemonic (not to mention historically specific and relative) progressive values on decent people if you kidnapped their precocious and charismatic 10-year-old son just because they censored his reading and were preemptively sending him to anti-gay weekend school, where there was no evidence of abuse or actual harm, just objectionable child-rearing choices (and everyone needs to be free to make their own choices, don't you know?).*
Obviously, the post-modern door can't be closed, and even if I only read The Giver and Gathering Blue, the other two books will always be out there and there's no going back. Sometimes, though, a fantasy about picking up and leaving your boring tedious compromised life to dodge the police on a wacky road-trip after making a snap and probably-bad decision to make a grand noble gesture and save that precocious, funny, excited kid from the stifling influence of his parents, is exactly what one wants. Okay, so the literary references and the librarian-angst are a little tiresome after a while, and the tone hovers anxiously between earnest and painfully self-conscious (but whose doesn't, these days?), and I don't even know what to do with the Soviet Russia/Russian Mafia finding-your-identity subplot.** But I was completely hooked, completely taken by Ian, completely involved in Lucy's zany adventures, and completely entertained for a couple of hours.
CONCLUSION: Would recommend, but only to a certain kind of person.
*I do think it's significant that the Drakes and their pastor are in no way portrayed as heinously evil, just as creating a small-minded warped environment that will ultimately probably harm their son. But don't worry -- Lucy has to interrogate her assumptions, too, at some point.
**One practical thing it did was smooth over the plausibility holes. The fact that they were smoothed over may be a weakness.
