Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Unnatural and Contrived

So, I don’t like the book very much so far. It’s alright, but I don’t think it’s very good. Korelitz uses some nice descriptions and generally appropriate word choice with a large vocabulary… but other than that I don’t think the novel is written very well. Everything—Portia, her emotions, thoughts, the situations she finds herself in—all seem so artificial and contrived. For instance, the frequent, vague references to some part of Portia’s past that she is trying to suppress or ignore or forget is a blatant attempt to pull the reader into the book with suggestions of some ominous plot twist, or some irrelevant secret of Portia’s past. Most likely she got pregnant at some point.

Also, the author has a tendency to write in a conspicuous and unnatural way: the “awkwardness” described between Portia and John when they first meet, and how he just so happens to have been madly in love with her since way back when, even though she has no idea who he is. And they way Portia ‘didn’t allow herself to think about what she intended or wanted to happen that night with John’ sounds more like Korelitz trying to surprise the reader and not Portia being completely unconscious to her own thoughts.

The references made to pop culture are almost painful and seems so deliberately placed into the scenery/environment of the novel. Starbucks, Harry Potter, Facebook… the references feel too out of place to be natural. It’s almost as if Korelitz googled “teenage interests” and tried—rather unsuccessfully—to seem savy about pop culture. In this way I think Korelitz is too blatantly trying to appeal to teenagers while the book itself seems written more for middle-aged adults.

I also dislike the overly omniscient feel Portia exudes as the main character, like she can sometimes read people’s thoughts. It goes beyond being able to read people well; she extracts or infers information about potential applicants and those whose actual applications she reads that she could not possibly know or come up with simply given the information at hand. Making assumptions or guessing about other people is fine, but Portia is so definite in her conclusions, she does not portray them as inferences, but as facts.

This blog ended up sounding pretty hateful, but I actually don’t despise the book. It reads much more easily than This Side of Paradise, but that’s probably just because Admission is a more modern novel. Overall, the book just seems a little empty. I believe that for a novel, it’s pretty okay, but the book is definitely not literature.

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