We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy FowlerMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
A good friend of mine recommended this book to me, going so far as to pull my magnetic "to do" list off my refrigerator and scrawling the title and author's name across my list of badly-needed groceries. This was a recommendation of unexpected, unusual force. My wife read it first, wept at the conclusion, and told me it had taken her awhile to get into it, but she really enjoyed it in the end. This is all to say that I came to this book with overly heightened expectations. Further, it's always tough on whatever book you read directly AFTER something you really loved.
So it is with all this preamble that I offer my groundbreaking literary analysis on We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves: meh. I liked it OK. The twisty, turny, time-bending story of a different family and the trauma that tears them apart and marks them for life, I found the book more about ideas than people. And the ideas are good ideas, fine ideas, interesting ideas -- ideas about memory and trauma and humanity and family and science and knowledge and love. It's just that, aside from the main character and (unreliable!) narrator Rosemarie, nobody really convinced me. Nobody jumped off the text and reminded me of real life.
The whole novel felt like a phantasmagorical noir where there's no mystery (except the mystery of memory!?), full of seemingly important objects that are either all red herrings or all symbols of something I didn't understand, and characters who cruise in and out of the narrative without any clear objective. (If you're looking for examples, I will simply list with no spoiler alert required: the wrong suitcase?, Madam Dafarge?, Harlow?, the building manager?.) It just felt like a daisy chain where the daisies are all different flowers and aren't even really tied together.
I have to add that the "Unreliable Narrator" doesn't grip me or shock me anymore. We get it: everything's subjective. Anything else you'd like to add? Also, the "Slipperiness of Memory" as an overriding theme feels like well-trod ground; it's a common enough theme that you've really got to hit it out of the park for me to be onboard. As we all get used to big reversals and giant reveals, it's increasingly dangerous to hang any literary hats on that sort of thing. I feel like, yeah, I expect this narrator to be unreliable and I expect that the things being told to me will get reversed/twisted at some point over the course of this novel. So the art has got to be not in the reversal itself, but in WHAT the reveal tells us as readers. Does it illuminate the story or character in a radically new way? Change our understandings fundamentally but still coherently? Or does it simply reinforce what we already believe? In the case of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, too many of those reveals don't reveal enough. And since we're fully aware of the unreliability of the narration, we're just waiting for reversals from the first anyway.
Still, the story is tragic enough and oddly compelling enough and well told enough that I made it all the way through without incident or compulsion to abandon ship. The thematic material -- all the capital i, Ideas -- offered plenty of grist for the mental mill. But I didn't attach emotionally to any of the characters the way my wife did, and I probably knew too much to be carried along on a blind roller-coaster ride the way my friend was. Overall, I enjoyed the book but it simply didn't do anything special for me.
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