Disobedience
January 5th, 2003by Jane Hamilton
ISBN: 0385720467
I suppose it is possible that I would have liked this novel better if Jane Hamilton hadn’t written it. I liked Book of Ruth and A Map of the World, so I had expectations for this book — expectations that weren’t met.
The setup was interesting enough. Seventeen year old Henry discovers his mother is having an affair by reading her email, and then it becomes a question of how her affair will affect everyone in the family: pianist Mom, mild-mannered history teacher Dad, obsessive Civil War reenactor little sister, rich but not necessarily liked Grandma. There was not an absence of wit, humor, or sarcasm (things I tend to like) either:
My father’s good cheer and optimism, however, were sustained qualities, based, as they were, on the general futility of the human condition. With his knowledge through history of man’s depravity and cunning, not to mention the whim of unpredictable forces, he figured a person might as well whistle away and live it up.
But I never really connected with the narrator. Told from the perspective of the teenage son but at the remove of some years, it just didn’t feel right and in the end his reason for telling it wasn’t particularly believable. If I’m going to be charitable as assume the stereotypes evident in the younger sister and the mother’s bookgroup were Henry’s and not Hamilton’s, they were still annoyingly and unecessarily done.
It isn’t so much that this is a bad book, but that isn’t a good one, and it should have been. Hamilton can write them; she just didn’t write one this time.
