*spoilers
I thought this book was beautifully written, and I was captivated the whole way through. This was becoming one of the greats in my mind as I was reading it, but felt the ending was so anticlimactic that it ruined the whole thing for me. I was preparing and ready for my heart to be ripped out in the end, but it just sort of peters out. Reading of the wife’s affair and the confrontation with both Rita and the speech therapist towards the end were great, but it just felt like it needed one more chapter to end the story. What happened to Merry? How did it end for her? I was waiting for that last confrontation between her and her dad. Did they ever meet again? How did he find out she had died as referenced at the start of the story? The imagining of her coming home versus the reality of the drunken stabbing by Orcutt’s wife just seemed like such a bad place to end the book. I understand what Roth was going for, and for the most part I liked the whole dinner party scene, but I guess I just felt like the story wasn’t over yet.
Anybody else feel the same? Has anybody else read the other books of the trilogy? Is this story wrapped up in the other books or referenced in the other books at all?
by NeeMan
1 Comment
All I’m going to say is in my memory all Philip Roth books end that way. No big confrontation, no resolution, people just continue living, people die of old age, no grand exit and curtain call. It just is what it is