unfair
I finished a book this morning that had one of those nonsensically tragic endings that piss me off. for one thing, it’s undignified to sit on your couch on a Saturday morning sobbing into your Rice Chex. but the more I thought about it, the more annoyed I was with the author. so the protagonist had just had this wonderful epiphany - the death of her sister all those years ago did not, as her tortured childhood mind saw it, mean that mingling among the classes led to an almost immediate death - and she could proceed with her friendship with Kakuro, hooray! and boom, she gets run over by a van and dies. sooo… mingling with the upper classes DOES lead to death? is that the lesson? if it had been a 19th century Russian novel, or anything in German, I suppose I could get behind this. but not a 2006 French book [translated into English, I’m not that cool]. I prefer my sad endings to be melancholy but still fitting. something that happens because of the character, a choice that has to be made, like the end of “The Age of Innocence.” well, actually the first example that comes to mind is the end of “Roman Holiday.” Not just author needs to make a point, so out comes the deadly drycleaner’s van. I was really enjoying the book until then.
We were supposed to read this for my bookclub but everyone forgot, and now we’re reading “Dreams from my Father” (or possibly one of the other Obama books) instead. how very 2007. pardon me while I totally lose interest in the face of actual present President Obama reality. but it means that I have to vent about this book’s end on this silly blog. On the other hand, I’m spared the embarassment of everyone looking at me like I’m crazy, which is what usually happens when I complain about tragic endings. like in 4th grade when we had to read my most hated book of all time, “Where the Red Fern Grows.” I’ll never forgive the school system for forcing that on me. did I really need to be exposed to horribly dying dogs in 4th grade? anyway now I’m going to go to the antiques fair, and then come home, watch “The Philadelphia Story” (fast forwarding through the offensive speech about how it’s Katherine Hepburn’s fault that her dad has spent his whole married career cheating on his wife with opera dancers) and read a Georgette Heyer novel.
