Slacks for Ella Funt

It seems like literary mysteries are pretty popular right now—see The Historian, The Shadow of the Wind, The Club Dumas, etc. This one felt pretty generic, almost exactly the same as The Shadow of the Wind, but not as good. The hidden secrets from the past part was interesting, but the searcher/narrator in the present wasn’t so developed. Pretty much the only characteristic the narrator had was a fascination with her twin who had died at birth. I think these books work best when the mysterious past and the detective story present are both captivating stories, and are much less effective when the author neglects the present.

I read this for my book club—we only read books set in New York. Though it was written in the mid 80s, Slaves of New York has a lot of the standard New York characters who still populate New York and movies/television/fiction about New York. The single girl, the self-important artist, the wannabe rock star, etc. At this point, though, particularly post Sex and the City, this sort of thing seems a pretty overdone and uninteresting. I’m sure Janovitz was original at the time, but it doesn’t seem particularly unique now.

I’ve been reading a fair amount of food writing lately, primarily online. Sort of armchair cooking, I guess, since I haven’t been cooking anything very involved these days. I enjoy reading about people making extremely complicated dishes that I would never try at home. Cooking her way through the entirety of the Julia Child cookbook, Julie Powell definitely attempts a lot of dishes that I would never try. The cooking descriptions are fun and some of the food, the parts that don’t involve liver, marrow, gelee, or anything else icky, sounds pretty good.

But the book isn’t just a book of food writing, it’s a memoir. And I had no interest in hearing about her medical issues, her friends’ love lives, her sex life with her husband, etc., etc. She seems like a complete drama queen, someone whose problems are always sooo much worse than everyone elses. I was pretty tired of hearing about it all by the end of the book.

I thought that I would like this book more than I did. The story about whether or not the narrator had faked her kidnapping as a teenager sounded interesting. Unfortunately, what the book ends up mostly being about is therapy and most of what happens is the narrator either talking to a therapist or talking about them. Pretty boring.