For context, I had read *The Goldfinch* before which I had loved, and right before reading TSH I had just finished William Faulkner’s *The Sound & The Fury,* so the change of pace from a heady and dense work like TS&TF to something more contemporary and what I’d call “Pop” literature (If that’s even a term, I come from a music background and I don’t know what else to call something that in spite of its phenomenal quality it’s still widely accesible and not as academic as something like, say, Joyce) might have really made the experience a much more fun roller coaster by contrast.
As always, I’d love to spark a discussion by talking about some of the things I loved and thought worked well in comparison to what I thought wasn’t as good:
**What I loved:**
* The plot itself, while slow at first, is really gripping and I found it to be a succesful page turner. As much as I was never very fond of any of the characters I couldn’t help but care deeply about the events in the novel and desperately wanting to find out what would happen.
* The characters themselves, although they’re sometimes cartoony and almost always unlikeable, felt really effective and even If I never found, for example, Henry to be a believable character, I still felt like I had a good idea of his personality and I was engaged by his interactions with the main plot, and felt like I could, if I wanted to, try to guess his motives or have a clear idea of how he’d react to a piece of information. In short, the characters threaded a line between farcical and cartoony yet believable
* The prose flows beautifully and it threads a line between being poetic and expressive and still always immediatelly graspable and easily digestible which fits for the thriller genre.
* I like>! how quickly the gang descends into decadence after killing Bunny.!<
**What I disliked:**
* The narrator himself feels quite weak. While I do like that the main point is how biased he is when it comes to interpreting the motivations and personalities of the people around him, I just could never stand how much he put up with with the main cast for no apparent reason whatsoever. I never had a good idea as to WHY >!he loved Camilla so much, other than his cringy inner monologues about how pretty she is, or why he kept going back over and over to Henry in spite of it being obvious, even to the narrator, that Henry is a psychopath with no regard for anybody other than himself. !<I just found myself missing Theo from goldfinch.
* Camilla’s character is basically non-existant at best and annoying at worst. The relationship the narrator has with her feels incredibly forced and superficial. I grew to dislike her almost as much as Bunny by the end of the novel.
* While I like the way Julian is utilized and the ambiguity of his relationship to Henry and his knowledge (or lackthereof) of the goings-on of the main cast is interesting, I felt he was underutilized. I liked how disgusting of a person he is shown to be at the end, but because he’s barely in the book while simulataneously being such a big influence in the stories events, it just felt odd to me how little he’s actually in the novel.
* I really don’t think the novels length is justified, as there seemed to be a lot of sections which contributed very little to the narrative.
What did you think about it? Did you love it? Hate it? Why? Talk to me, strangers.
by ManuBekerMusic