When I was teaching English I always listened carefully to my students’ accounts of what they were reading and quite often read their recommendations as a way of a) demonstrating my open-mindedness b) teaching respect and c) keeping up to date with the tastes of young people. Then, if I didn’t like what I’d read I was in a position to explain why, and I hoped, to model critical reading.
I was reminded forcibly of all that when my second granddaughter, 22, came to stay with me recently. She and her older sister are, I learned, very keen on Colleen Hoover, of whom,I had to admit, I had never heard. Still open-minded and no literary snob, I promptly ordered It Ends With Us which was published in 2016.
When I began to read, my heart sank. Set in Boston, Mass it’s a first person narrative presenting a young woman, Lily, who starts her own business, gets into an abusive relationship, and hankers for a gentle lad she knew as a teenager. That’s enough about the plot because you might decide to read it and you won’t thank me for spoilers.
My initial reaction was that it’s badly written: “Like all the air is being let out of his heart” or “my blood feels like it’s bubbling”. The narrative method is clumsy. As means of filling in the details of Lily’s backstory we are treated to lengthy extracts from unsent letters the teenage Lily wrote to a TV presenter which form a quasi-journal which she rereads now as an adult. And the characterisation is miserably shallow. Ryle is a stereotypical dishy doctor with issues and a good salary, Atlas is implausibly saintly and Allysa so jolly decent that you wish she’d do something reprehensible because, as it is, she’s a cardboard cut-out. And to name her unfortunate child “Rylee” after her brother is nauseating. The vocabulary gets repetitive in places too. I soon wearied of the word “cute”. Moreover there’s quite a lot of sex which is tediously and unsexily described. In terms of literary merit it sits somewhere between Flowers in the Attic and Fifty Shades of Grey. Nonetheless I plodded on out of fairness to my granddaughters.
Well, this novel is over 370 pages long and when I got into the final 60 pages or so I began, to my surprise, to warm to it a little when I realised Hoover’s quite serious purpose. Through her narrator, she is exploring the complex mindset of someone who is in an abusive marriage but still loves the abuser and knows that he loves her. Such a situation is nothing like as straightforward as “He hit me so I’m leaving” which is how outsiders, who don’t have this experience, usually expect it to be. There are some very confused and confusing emotions and anxieties, not least about children forced to grow up in abusive householders. Moreover, if love still draws you it’s extremely hard to quit. And when you get to the very end and read Hoover’s authorial note you learn that her own father was abusive and discover how that panned out for her family. That, of course, is why, when she eventually reaches the nub of her novel, it suddenly feels truthful. I ended up, therefore, being quite glad I’d read it although I shan’t, I’m afraid, be adding Hoover to my list of favourite authors.
Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Koran: A Very Short Introduction by Michael Cook
