Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James
My rating: 3/5 cats
now hear me out, people. i liked it, but i didn’t like it-like it. the writing is shitty, it is, but i am a sucker for enthusiasm. and you can tell she has it. at the reading of hers i worked, she didn’t come across as some fame-hungry monster -she seems as baffled by her success as i am. it’s like people with ugly kids. they know what they have brought into the world, but they love it regardless, and they’re just happy when the other kids play with it on the playground. and it’s not that i think she’s ashamed of it, she probably thinks it is quite good, but she knows it isn’t high lit or anything.
and yeah, it started out as fanfiction, but i was informed rather tartly last night that she always intended to publish it and was just using the fanfic community for feedback, so any grace i was going to give to her on the grounds that “this was intended as a tribute not initially intended for publication and so we can’t judge it on the same grounds” has been undermined. but i will keep it at three stars cats, because it was okay, for what it was. i rolled my eyes a lot while reading this (and in terms of this book’s rules, my ass would have been SO sore) but there was something about the author’s dopey-puppy earnestness that i found endearing. so, final verdict: not terrible(okay, a little terrible), but not worthy of a ny times bestseller when there are so many genuinely good books out there. onto…
the sex
and those of you with a knee-jerk reaction to bdsm – because i have seen comments on threads for this review that this book is about rape and beatings etc. etc. – just know that this is very hot topic bdsm – by which i mean the subculture fashion store at suburban malls, not that it is very topical and jodi picoult will write a book about it. although she probably will, now, now that all the ladies are reading this and wanting to spice up their bedroom lives with their schlubby husbands.i myself am not into the lifestyle, but as far as people i know who are, i know wayyy more female doms than male doms. let’s face it, female doms have hotter clothing than female subs. and bdsm isn’t about rape. it isn’t about abuse. it is about trust, as dana so aptly put it last night (she is also not part of that scene. to my knowledge) but it is an arrangement. it is an understanding. there are safewords and precautions and for some people, that’s just the way they are wired: top, bottom, straight, gay, dom, sub… and i hate it when people get all high-handed on the internets about kinks they don’t understand.
“i got an open mind so why don’t you all get inside”
but as far as this book goes, this is the most vanilla bdsm i have ever read. she’s a virgin when they meet, and he is respectful of that, which was one of the better scenes in the book. but like any relationship in this fetish, they work out the details beforehand and determine their boundaries. and honestly, she is a shitty, shitty sub; she says “no” to a bunch of things that even i have done and i am not even kinky. and he isn’t interested in things that many typical bdsm relationships would include, which ditto for that. (by which i mean i have looked a man in the eye – you don’t need to know my life.) so it’s very tame. if disney were going to make a bdsm movie, they would use the same contract.
because real suspension??
it looks more like this:
or this:
or this:
what they do is what teenagers do when they are still in their experimentation stage. okay – so that’s out of the way – this is bondage-lite.
moving on to the rest of it, because this had a lot fewer scenes of erotic journeying than i had feared. there are still plenty, but the first scene isn’t until after page 100, and after that, it isn’t taking over the whole book. but there’s still enough for you people who aren’t reading this for the articles.
there is a lot of debate about whether this reads like twilight, because it started out as twilight fanfic. some people say “yes” some people say “nooo.” i am here to break that tie.
OF COURSE IT READS LIKE TWILIGHT!!!
are you mad?? ALL the twilightisms are there: the “i’m bad for you” speeches, the emphasis on smells, the ineffable attraction of a perfect and wealthy man to an underdescribed, clumsy and tongue-tied female who is all “who, me??” with all of the self-doubt and self-esteem issues, all the “how can such a perfect specimen fall for li’l ole me??”, the seeecrets and the endless endless repetitions.and those repetitions make the book so frequently annoying.but that’s not her fault, not if that is what she is going for. it’s actually quite remarkable that she was able to mimic meyer’s style to that extent. sure, it’s irritating as hell, but as an homage, it’s quite accomplished.i have decided to interpret her linguistic quirks as homage, not as weak writing. feel free to disagree – it’s just my take on it. (although the writing is frequently weak in other areas as well. i am just feeling generous.)
language
first of all, e.l. james is british. and yet – because this is twilight fanfic, she had to set it in washington state. but no one told her how we talk. pssst – we use our present perfect tense differently than you do. yes, even those of us who are/were lit majors. when americans say things like “i’ve not been there” etc, it sounds pompous. sorry to you americans who do talk like that, but it does. it sounds affected. especially in erotic fiction set in washington state.
miscellaneous
there are so many gasps in here, it may as well have been titled the great gaspy. i personally have never heard a man gasp with lust in response to something i have said. how do i do this? does he have a breathing disorder? why are his eyes always darkening? i have never noticed this phenomenon, but it is a staple of romance novels. i was not aware this could actually happen. biting of the lips, linen, inner goddess, subconscious, medulla oblongata, blushing, control freak… get used to these words. there are at least 50 occurrences of these words on every page.
characters
i do not understand his attraction to our heroine. she never says anything interesting, except in her emails. those emails are the best part of this book. she shows more personality there than in any conversation, and that’s just odd, to me. i’m not sure why i was expecting much more from a character whose favorite book is tess, because you know how i feel about that book, but i was glad to see thomas hardy pop up frequently, even if it is my least favorite of his books.
and christian is also unstable and mercurial and full of anger towards peccadilloes. and – god – his food issues. even without his sexual needs, this guy is a piece of work. i’m not sure i could put up with someone so changeable, even if he was an uncommonly gorgeous billionaire who wanted to buy me old and expensive books… gotta draw the line somewhere.
plus, once i saw the leather bed, i’d be outta there. that’s just gross, all sticky and germ-encouraging.
i don’t know – i wanted to write a much better review for this book – there was so much i wanted to say, but i am feeling lazy right now. i feel weird giving it three stars cats, because there was so much about this book i didn’t like, but the three-stars cats here is more of a “i thought it was going to be so much worse than it is” and my deeply charitable heart which overlooks weaknesses in favor of an author’s zeal.
but here, enjoy this link of gilbert gottfried reading this book aloud:
http://www.collegehumor.com/embed/677…
and here are three other options, if you’d rather giggle:
fifty shades of grey pussy cats
a coupla shades of taupe
fifty shames of earl grey
OOOOHHH the movie opens TODAY!! now, i’m not likely to ever see the movie, but i will say it’s pretty ballsy to cast the romantic lead – a character who ties up ladies for erotic enjoyment – with the actor that many people only know as the character who ties up ladies for erotic enjoyment … and then kills them.
