The Best Awful brings back Suzanne Vale, she of Postcards From the Edge notoriety. Vale is, very early on, a 'breadwinner with a very yang personality'. She opens the proceedings with a spin on an old Woody Allen line ("My wife left me for another woman"). Her husband, also the father of her daughter, leaves her for another man. Vale comforts herself with bipolar medication. Vale's anguish, if you can call it that, arises from her failure to detect her husband's sexual preferences. This seriously dents her self-esteem. Apparently, this is a must-have skill for all married women. Having discovered her shortcomings in that department, Vale sets out to compensate by engaging in determinedly heterosexual sex and promptly runs through three men including (but of course) one who is several years younger. Unsurprisingly, this does nothing either for Vale or the narrative and Fisher shifts into four-wheel substance-abuse overdrive in (but of course) Tijuana among other places. That can't be sustained either so it's back to LA and the location scouts have now zeroed in on a psychiatric clinic. But how to get Vale there? The answer leaps to mind: An overdose (but of course). By now, we've reached a total dead end and Fisher, evidently scrabbling for some foothold to drag the book out of this hole, settles for a pseudo-Harlequin Romance finale which I'd love to wreck here but won't.
Fisher, unfortunately, has very little to say that is truly original. She therefore deploys linguistic camouflage--mostly awkward contrivances. But even that can't relieve the tedium. Suzanne Vale's disintegration is so predictable that it's almost laughable: medication-pointless sex-nervous breakdown-overdose-clinic and, ultimately, resurrection and salvation Hollywood-style. You can almost hear the chorus. But even that doesn't work. Like the rest of the book, it remains arid and ferociously tiresome. This is a book that exhausts you because Fisher just tries too hard for too much. She tries to make her heroine not herself and to make both her heroine and herself likable. It doesn't work. It's just words, words, words being flung at you, as I said, over-punctuated and often redundant. This is like being had by Hannibal and his elephants. At the end, frankly, my dears, we really don't give a damn.
Article comments
1 - Keilantra
I completely disagree with this. The Best Awful is wordy, yes, may have excessive punctuation, but if you look at it as a whole, that craftmanship of this novel is outstanding. I have never been so touched by a novel in so many ways before. Perhaps it is because you mere mortals have never felt what Fisher so stunningly describes... oh so tongue in cheek!
It was some sort of echo for me
2 - Vita
I haven't read the book, but I love this review! It almost makes me want to read the book for a sort of masochistic--thrill. Gosh. And you're right about bullocks/bollocks.