Stepford Wife

I am also very bored. The mom reminds me of the typical La Canada stepford wife that stays at home all day and works out. It is hard to want to read this book. It also bugs me how the parents could just leave the two boys at home without knowing that the other does not have them.

Tobar's Subtle Irony

Okay.  I started reading Barbarian Nurseries again.  I just started Chapter 7.

The first thing I would like to share is the observation that Héctor Tobar writes beautiful prose.  He seems to know the words for everything:  garden plants, freeways, maids’ uniforms, etc.  The novel to this point has relied primarily on description, with snippets of the charaters’ thoughts woven in.  When a bit of dialogue arrived in Chapter 6, I was relieved.  It was excellent, advancing the story while suggesting real speech patterns.

You cannot have failed to notice the way the narrator’s point of view has moved in and out of the consciousness of the characters.  Their thoughts receive direct representation in italics.  This way of inserting thoughts into the narrative discourse is called “free indirect discourse” (at least that is what it is called in French, and it is probably the same in English).  Such thoughts need not be italicized, but the author (or his editor at Farrar, Strauss and Giroux) does it for the sake of clarity, I suppose.

This is only Chapter 7, but I must say I am bored to tears in spite of Tobar’s fine writing.  The characters are not likeable:  even the narrator does not really seem to withhold judgment on them. 

I detect a subtle irony in all these descriptions, simmering just under the surface, as the narrator pretends to “present” a world when, in fact, he offers up unflattering slices of it for his readers’ judgment.  Two examples:  1) The attention drawn to the lawn mower at the beginning of the novel asks us to pass a moral judgment about Scott (as a man, as a rich man, as an American, etc.), and 2) Maureen’s obsession with the garden, and her humiliation over it during the party, also suggest an implicit condemnation. She seems superficial and self-centered.

But this irony does not go so far as what you find in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, where the dissonance between the tone and the content often border on cruelty and hilarity.  (This is a novel you must read next summer, if you remember by then.)

One thing does strike me as intriguing:  Tobar does not make Araceli especially likeable.  On the contrary, this object of our compassion, or at least of potential compassion, appears resentful, contemptuous, and cold.  A lesser writer would make her an angel.

I am wracking my brains to see where this book could be going other than simply providing a mini-tour of southern California by way of beautifully written descriptive prose.