reading notes

by Douglas Bauer

ISBN: 0805060022

This book made me think of what I thought grown-up novels were supposed to be like when I was a kid too little to read them: pages and pages of meandering story, kind of boring because there aren’t many suprises and nothing much happens. Which is to say, this book wasn’t as good as I expected it to be. (Fortunately, I was wrong about grown-up books.)

The story had some promising elements: an eccentric grandmother who is creating the scrapbook that gives the novel its title; an affair with a younger man who is a baseball player; a boy on the verge of adolescence. They just don’t come together in a compelling way. The man-writing-now-looking-back-on-then narration intrusively spells out things we should be able to get from the story. The writing is good, but in no way exemplary. The setting is a small farm town in Iowa. The blah, blah, blah…

I vaguely remember reading another book by Bauer called The Very Air, which I think I liked better than this, but not enough so to seek out another of his novels. Not particularly recommended.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 29th, 2003 at 4:15 pm and is filed under fiction.