A few weeks ago I read Helen Schulman’s This Beautiful Life, a novel hinged upon an email transaction gone wrong. My expectations for this book were high. The early buzz reached me through my email inbox, my Twitter account, Facebook, People magazine, and on the front page of the Sunday Times Book Review. I felt bombarded, honestly, and probably wouldn’t have read the book right away had I not been offered a copy from the publisher. I tend to resist “must reads,” but with all this hype and a review copy on its way to me, I pushed aside my towering pile of books to read and dug into Schulman’s almost as soon as it arrived.
This Beautiful LIfe is a very quick read and given my already-piqued curiosity was easy to dive in to. I was able to immerse myself in it during napt imes and finish in just a few days. There is always a certain satisfaction in completing a book so quickly. But in this case, I never felt fully satisfied. I always was left wanting more, whether I’d just read a few paragraphs or 50 pages. Wanting more isn’t always bad, of course. A book that leaves me with questions at the end lives in my mind long after I’ve read it. And isn’t that what we hope for as writers? To leave a lasting impression? This isn’t easy to do, and few writers succeed at leaving me with the best question: The one for which there is no right or wrong answer but instead more of a persistent curiosity and the wonderment of what next will happen to a certain fictional character in his certainly fictional world.
But upon finishing the book I was left with a different sort of questioning. One that left me unsettled. I didn’t just want more, but I felt uncomfortable with what was within the pages. I didn’t really even know what questions I wanted to ask.
Schulman’s book paints a portrait of a family in New York City–a very different environment from my own in western Massachusetts but not altogether unimaginable. It’s a fast-paced life, a high-powered life, a life of private schools and portrayals of characters that my Sweetie and I would call “the beautiful people.” It’s an aptly titled book telling the story of a family that is fully imagined and clearly communicated through writing that is true if a bit infused with the feeling that the author rushed to finish a manuscript rather than flesh out completely the complexities of the lives she created.
I used to feel personally disappointed when I finished a book that didn’t meet my expectations. Not unlike the feeling upon walking out of a movie theater after sitting through a predicted Oscar-winning film that didn’t hold my attention. But now. Now I’ve been writing, publicly, for long enough to have changed my reaction to that disappointment. It goes something like this: Hey, good for [Helen Schulman]. S/he got a book published! That’s my dream. So what if it’s not my cup of tea. It’s a book. And (other) people liked it enough to publish it and buy it and write about it, too.
Maybe if I had stumbled upon this book on my own I would have felt differently. Maybe if I hadn’t read it amidst the chaos of three children jumping on the bed and yelling for me every other minute I would have felt more immersed. Maybe no matter what, Helen Schulman and I aren’t the right writer/reader combo. But I’m not sure of that last maybe. I’m going to take a look at some of her earlier work. And maybe we’ll hit it off. I love words. And books. And I love the diversity of readers and writers in my reading and writing community and communities beyond. And even though this wasn’t a book that spoke to me, maybe you should give it a try. And if you do (or if you already have), let me know what you think.
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Originally posted in September 2011