With summer comes the inevitable Summer Beach Read. The SBR was created so that one could read, doze and pick up again without having to re-read the previous page. The topic should be lighthearted with easy to remember characters and plain vocab that doesn't require dragging along a dictionary. My most recent two books met most of these requirements.
The first, a book club pick, The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud, detailed the lives of a handful of 30 something adults living in Manhattan. The second, a several years old hand me down from friend and former bar night buddy, Tishka, called In The Drink by Kate Christensen detailed the lives of a handful of 30 something adults living in Manhattan.
This summer has not produced the number of weekend beach days that I normally enjoy, so I've been imagining my front porch and inside sofa (with a soft breeze coming in from the window), as my beach. Since I haven't had to take frequent cool offs in the water, I was able to speed through these books. Being nearly 30 myself I was anticipating identifying with the characters in The Emperor's Children, but instead found their lives to be completely incongruous with mine; Marina is entitled, spoiled, and self centered. She lives with her parents and is unemployed, save for a manuscript she's been working on for seven years. Her close friend Danielle is slightly better off-- she has a "real" job and lives on her own, but is professionally and personally unfulfilled. Any respect I had for her I lost completely when she started an affair with Marina's famous father. Julian is their token gay and ethnic friend. I refer to him as such because he has no real function in the context of the rest of their lives. It's unclear to me what any of them have in common. Oh, he is mostly unemployed as well. Marina's 19 year old cousin, Frederick "Bootie" Tubb is the catalyst character and the most interesting and dynamic. Whereas the rest of them are filled with ennui, Bootie sets out and repeatedly makes changes to his unhappy life. I was pleased that the novel ended as it did.
Claudia is the primary character of In The Drink and she, along with her friends William, Jane and a few others whose names I've already forgotten, could easily be friends with the gang from The Emperor's Children. Claudia is an alcoholic with a dead end job (commisserate with Julian!) as a personal secretary to a socialite Jackie (who could float in the same circle as Marina's father, Murray Thwaite). She longs to write her own books (talk to Marina) instead of ghostwriting Jackie's. She doesn't eat well, she is broke, lives in a cruddy apartment and drinks too much. She has an on again off again affair with a married man (compare notes with Danielle) and makes no effort to improve her situation. In The Drink was similar to The Devil Wears Prada and any number of the other books that feature loser young adults living in Manhattan. I cringed while reading this book and couldn't imagine anyone with so little self esteem...and I subsequently felt miserable and depressed after reading it.
I need to change directions with my next book...no more beach reads! Or, maybe I just need to get off the couch and to the beach...
Netflix stars for both books: 2/5.
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