Beware of low-flying book

Sharon Wheeler

Do you like your books to be a comfortable maintaining of the status quo, or do you want them to reflect real life where things really do move on and change.

I only ask as I am currently contemplating a dent in my wall where a book hit it at speed this week. It wasn't a crime fiction one, but the question could apply equally well to genre stories (especially if you want to think about cosy mysteries, for example).

The book that did GBH to the wall was Naomi Alderman's Disobedience. It won the Orange Award for New Writers in 2006. All I can think is that it must have been a weak year, or that the judges were blinded by the too clever by half prose that reminded me of a writing exercise (oh, look, Alderman did the Creative Writing MA at University of East Anglia. I rest my case.)

I'd better warn you that humungous spoilers will follow, just in case you are bored enough to want to read Disobedience . . .

A lapsed Jewish woman returns to London following the death of her eminent rabbi father. She has a high-powered job in New York and has been shagging a married man. Back in the UK she comes across a former lover (female – ooh, daring!) who is now royally screwed up and hitched to the rabbi's bumbling prodigy. LJW riffles through her father's house to find some candle sticks that remind her of her late mother, encounters some deeply weird people from the congregation, has a bit of angst over her relationship with the former lover, then pushes off home when the nasty synagogue bloke waves a large cheque at her because she's seen as an embarrassment. Former lover has lots of angst over her sexuality, goes and gets pregnant after having sex with hubby for the first time since dinosaurs walked the earth, and proceeds to win over the congregation despite them knowing about her affair with LJW and having hated her for all of the book. Erm, that's it.

The book reminded me of a soufflé – it looks substantial on the surface, but once you stick a fork in it, it deflates to nothing. There's lots of flashy prose on Orthodox Jewish traditions but the character development is so flimsy it'd blow away in a breeze, and there's absolutely no attempt to provide a believable story arc or to deal realistically and consistently with the sexuality angle.

I think the thing that made me the most angry, though, was the ending. Alderman provides virtually no sympathetic characters during the book, and is particularly heavy-handed with the congregation members. All of a sudden, though, there's this nauseatingly cutesy page and a half to round the book off where LJW skates over her sexuality and lack of religious belief and a patriarchal religion in a "oh, it's OK to be gay and I’ll always have faith" way. Erm, right, I see, where did that come from?

When it boils down to it, the book is deeply conservative and actually really rather homophobic. LJW goes back to America and nothing has changed in her life. The former lover has a baby and stays with the bumbling prodigy which suggests strongly that you can't be happy if you're a lesbian and all they need to sort them out is a bloke shagging them.

If ever any book reinforces the status quo, Disobedience does. That status quo may be comfortable. But it also makes for dull, frustrating and almost offensive reading.

Comments

[Jeff Cohen]

"which suggests strongly that you can't be happy if you're a lesbian and all they need to sort them out is a bloke shagging them"

You say that as if it's a bad thing...

Jeff

[Lartonmedia]

Ah, in that case, all your hero needs is a good shagging from another bloke to turn him gay :o)

[Jeff Cohen]

Hey, you never know. He's always searching for answers...

[Lartonmedia]

Go on, then!

[Robin Agnew]

I have serious problems with contemporary "literary" fiction in general - often it's just plain boring. THis sounds like an especially horrible example, though! Good write up.

[Lartonmedia]

Thanks, Robin! I'm getting more and more disillusioned with 'literary' fic. This book genuinely sounded like it was doing something adventurous. I think that's partly why I hurled it at the wall with such force when I discovered it wasn't!