I offer some foul and fair women's fiction

Each of the selections by women novelists were greeted with a certain amount of commercial and critical fanfare. Two weren't exactly my cuppa.

The Goldfinch ****

by Donna Tartt

This novel proved to be an excellent companion during a recent and very long hospital vigil. It follows the story of young Theo, whose life is shattered by a bomb in an art museum. Before the dust settles (literally) on this event, Theo has lost his mother, met his dream girl and her grand-uncle, and has rescued the eponymous painting (it's a real one by Carel Fabritius, shown left). Each of these events forms a strand in Tartt's somewhat rambling but always compelling picaresque plot.

Critics have called this book "Dickensian," and I guess I see some similarities in the eccentric minor characters and the whole orphan-boy-on-his-own bit, but that's about it. The novel has none of Dickens' social criticism; rather it's more of a psychological exploration of the nature of tragedy and how it can both damage and redeem the individual. Like Fabritius's goldfinch, Theo is chained to circumstances. A good many links in Theo's chain are cruel mishaps or deliberately destructive things Theo does to himself and others. But other links are kindnesses and people whom Theo loves. He spends a lot of time trying to fly away (as it were) from these circumstances, but they restrict him as much as the goldfinch in his painting is restricted. Theo nearly ends by flailing around so much that his chain is snarled and shortened, and he is in danger of strangling himself. 

However, Theo eventually begins to undo the snarls he has made of his life, and a relatively intelligent reader will appreciate what Tartt is trying to do and how the painting fits into the whole quite nicely as a literary device. Sadly, Tartt felt the need to add a long denoument in which Theo philosophizes about his life and experiences and how they relate to Fabritius's painting. I can't say there aren't interesting, even lyrical passages in this epilogue, but it seems wholly unnecessary. Some judicious editing would be in order.

The Interestings **1/2

by Meg Wollitzer

And speaking of judicious editing, Meg Wollitzer's 500-page soaper needs a brush hog to cut down the weeds. It's not that this book doesn't have its merits. At heart, I see this book as an exploration of envy with Generation Jones front and center in the person of Julie, or Jules as she is rechristened and re-born in a single night with the cool group (who name themselves "The Interestings") at an arts camp the summer her father dies of cancer. 

Jules and the five cool kids with whom she becomes BFF4ever are 15 when the book opens, and Wollitzer follows them through the intervening 40 years. One of the original six, Jonah, the son of a Joan Baez-type folk singer, is completely superfluous to the plot and could have been left out entirely, since he adds nothing thematically to the nature of Jules's attitude to the rest of the group--which is basically that their lives have remained spectacularly interesting, while her life (she is a competent therapist married to a loving and sensitive ultrasound technician and has a wonderful self-directed and low-maintenance daughter) is a gyp. 

To be fair, Wollitzer does look at the way envy can waste our lives and how, in a world defined by material good, those without spiritual resources can become withered. But the book loses this focus often. Worse, Wollitzer makes it pretty clear that she doesn't much like Jules and her superficiality--but, like Jules--she seems jealous and snarky about the most materially successful of them. She even punishes one of the cool kids with banishment and poverty. It's as if Wollitzer hasn't grown past some resentments and envy of some of the cool kids she knew in her own past, and can't help inserting herself as the seventh "interesting" in this novel.

Mary McCarthy did this sort of thing much better in her 1963 novel, "The Group."

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy **

by Helen Fielding

Helen Fielding is quite a good novelist, and her "Diary of Bridget Jones" was a clever little send-up of "Pride and Prejudice." The sequel, "The Edge of Reason," was entertaining but less clever for having strayed from the source material. And the sequel to the sequel is pretty dreadful. 

Bridget is now 50, has two small children, and Mark Darcy is no longer in the picture, but his exit (I won't spoil it) is fairly predictable. Most of this book is taken up with Bridget's fling with a much younger man. Yay, her. Bridget's one time lover-nemesis, Daniel Cleaver, makes a reappearance, and his scenes are genuinely very funny.

But what's jarring is that Bridget seems to have regressed--the reliance on poo, fart, and vomit mishaps and jokes are REALLY off-putting--and the sorting out that occurs at the end of the novel is contrived and unimaginative (hint: Would a Darcy by any other name still walk around like he had a stick up his bum? Yes).

Time for Fielding to go back to Olivia Joules, I think!