Collie's Bestiary - Stormtiger

Quick synopsis (which I wish the book had also had): A story of teen angst and adultery. I couldn't identify with the characters, I found the writing excessively self-indulgent, and I didn't enjoy the story.

Okay, if you're still here reading with me, I'll try to keep it short. When you're done, please feel free to go find a good book to read.

The book is written like a "slice of life" for Henry, a teen boy in his last year before college. He discovers, through snooping on his family's computer and reading his mother's e-mail, that his mother is having an affair. For the entire year the affair lasts, he inflicts angst upon himself about this.

In the end he is a classic self-absorbed "Hamlet" figure: faced with familial treachery, he whines incessantly in pointless internal dialogue about how bothered he is -- but ultimately does nothing useful. Life goes on around him, family emergencies come and go... and he is but the perennial bystander, emotionally betraying even as he convinces himself of his innocence.

Unfortunately it's not clear whom the story is truly about. Is it about the self-righteous, angsty teen struggling with Oedipal confusion and repeatedly blurting out his mother's secret even as he justifies his voyeurism as somehow "protecting" the family? Is it the frustrated, adulterous mother's story, almost monotonously coping with her apparent mid-life crisis through sex, emotional pain, and prose?

Or is the story actually about the author? Is she trying to persuade herself that love can indeed be expressed as weary patience waiting out betrayal by a loved one? Or is she working out her dislike of both angsty teens and the sometimes smothering nature of families, giving us incessant daily details of the limited thought processes of a self-absorbed, obsessed boy?

The title of the story comes from a poem of the same name by A. A. Milne, from his 1924 book When We Were Very Young:

James James
Morrison Morrison
Weatherby George Dupree
Took great
Care of his Mother,
Though he was only three.
James James Said to his Mother,
"Mother," he said, said he;
"You must never go down
to the end of the town,
if you don't go down with me."

Of course she does: she puts "on a golden gown" and tells herself, "I can get right down / to the end of the town / and be back in time for tea." Inevitably she goes missing, despite the best efforts of James James and King John to find her. The poem is cute -- light-hearted and repetitive in a style well suited to happy children chanting along with the storyteller.

Unfortunately, reading it after reading the book lent a patronizing note to the entire story. Henry's incessant internal whining suffers in comparison to a three-year-old's stern admonitions. Henry's mother, already depersonalized by him to a distant "Liza38" (her e-mail alias) or "Mrs. Shaw," is equally trivialized as a naughty girl who doesn't listen. Reflected in the poem, the rest of the family -- their very real pains and triumphs -- are negated, absented in comparison to Henry's petulance and obsessing on his mother. It would be disturbing, if I cared at all about the characters.

The author was finally able to appall me, however, when she described Henry's uninvolved interest with the "artsy-ness" of the moment -- while his little sister is about to get raped. Moments later his embarrassment at his mother's fierce and passionate defense of the girl is quite simply mind-boggling. Unfortunately I'm not kidding here: Henry's mother successfully holds off a handful of angry men, standing all alone to defend her daughter -- and all Henry feels is embarrassment at her actions!

I just couldn't manage to identify with Henry, though I tried -- he has all the irritating tendencies of Salinger's Holden (from Catcher in the Rye) to thoughtlessly damage others, and none of the imagination. Nor does he appear to change or grow whatsoever -- at least Holden had an emotional breakdown!

The other characters were fairly well sketched in, although I found the mother curiously flat. The obsessive daughter is particularly harshly drawn, but sadly none of them feel any more real than the whiny boy trying to substitute righteous indignation for a personality.

Halfway through the story I put the book down for a few weeks simply because it was too depressingly boring to continue reading in one sitting. I finished the book out of a sense of duty more than anything else. I wish I had those hours back.

In her introduction the author mentions going to a writing workshop where the instructor wondered why it was that all women writers at some point always wrote about adultery. Hamilton notes her inner reaction was a dismayed, "Do I have to?" After finishing Disobedience, my uncharitable thought was a dismayed, "Why did you?"