I didn’t have The Blue Book on my radar at all. But I read a review in the New York Times that talked about the author, AL Kennedy, as most closely akin to Richard Ford, whose book Canada I loved and wrote about previously. So I put it on my list. It sat on the pile for a while; every time I picked it up and read the flap, it just did nothing for me.
When I finally picked it up, this paragraph greeted me on the first page: “And you’re a reader — clearly — here you are reading your book, which is what it was made for. It loves when you look, wakes when you look, and then it listens and it speaks. It was built to welcome your attention and reciprocate with this: the sound it lifts inside you. It gives you the signs for the shapes of the names of the thoughts in your mouth and in your mind and this is where they sing, here at the point where you both meet.”
Sheer bliss to read language like that. And on the first page! Here’s another little darling I’m glad Ms. Kennedy didn’t kill from much later in the story: “…any boys at all can still light her, trouble her with what they start in rushed and brave and slapdash kisses, in how they speak to her body, wake places she won’t let them see, in how they work transformations, imitation magics, have blunt but effective hands. Boys will startle her too much at first, or make her frighten herself with herself…”
It was the author’s use of language that kept me reading this book. Without it I would have given up because I didn’t like either of the main characters. The last book I tried to read with such vile people as the leads was Bonfire of the Vanities. which I never finished because I disliked everyone in the book so heartily. I guess Beth and Art, the two “protagonists” in The Blue Book have some redeeming characteristics — an ambivalence about their past, which they spent preying on the relatives of the recently (or not-so-recently) dead and beguiling them into believing that they had the ability to talk to their passed over loved ones.
Some of the story is told in interior monologues by Beth, helpfully italicized so you know she’s talking to herself. Other parts of the story are narrated by the book itself. Which is interesting. But to be honest, I don’t much like the book’s character either. There are a lot of flashbacks, and they don’t hold together or make complete sense until the book is three quarters done. It wasn’t until the last 120 pages or so that I got the whole story to make sense, and thus became interested. Those last chapters flew by.
I like Kennedy’s writing enough to give another of her books a try. I can hardly blame the writer in general for the failure of her characters in particular to inspire fondness, right?
Next up, something less literary and more fluffy: Dad Is Fat by Jim Gaffigan. You’ll be the first to know if it’s worthy of a report.
