Reading this morning’s New York Times’ Book Review review of Patricia Hampl’s The Florist’s Daughter I realize that I need to re-emphasize that my comments on the book are not disinterested. While claiming friendship would be overreaching, I creative-direct her web site and we’ve known each other for years.
I realized this when I tugged the paper out of the blue wrapper, pre-caffeine, located the book review, flipped pages and then scanned paragraphs–all with the heart-ticking impatience of a spy looking for some equation that would hold the key to Western Civilization.
I’m usually all for essayistic reviews, but I wanted to smack Danielle Trussoni. Her first paragraph is a meditation on parental death: “Death is just a hiccup, a trick, a detour in your lives. Soon, the two of you will walk down the street to a bar, order a few drinks, and complain about how uncomfortable the whole thing is.”
Trish was describing something very particular: the death of a parent who has been lingering, collecting an annuity of duty. Her mother, like an aunt who preceded her, was not on her way to any bar but rather to a chartless place where "she probably no longer knew she was a person and not just a bit of lost being curled on a mattress."
Then Trussoni devotes the second paragraph to Joan Didion’s memoir about the sudden death of her husband. Personal experience and literary references can broaden and deepen a review; but don’t these dicta need to be relevant to the book?
What’s unfortunate is that, once she gets to the book itself, Trussino is both insightful in her analysis and lavish in her praise–there are tons of good quotes– and my few quibbles with the rest of the review are just the normal clashing of subjectivities.
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