Driftwood by Elizabeth Dutton
My rating: 3/5 cats
For someone who used to only cry from laughing too hard, I was getting a little tired of my own waterworks.
this is both an arrested coming of age story and a twist on the picaresque novel.
clem jasper is the 27-year old daughter of an insanely well-known rock star. her life is pretty charmed – her parents are still happily married and take her and her siblings on exotic family vacations, she’s never had to have a real job, she was given a mercedes as a present, and yet she feels rudderless, unsure of what she wants out of life or relationships. when her beloved father dies suddenly, her feelings of purposelessness are exacerbated by her grief, until she finds that she has been left a bundle of letters in her father’s will, with the request that she read them in order – no skipping ahead – and follow their instructions to the letter.
tommy jasper died unexpectedly (playing ping pong, no less), but not unprepared, and he was well aware of clem’s helplessness in forging her own path, and indulgent of her stalled development
“You’re like driftwood, my baby girl. All that tumbling around in the world makes you feel lost, but it’s just polishing you up.”
from there, this book becomes a sentimental road trip novel, as clem follows her father’s letters, which chronicle his life before she was born, and visits all the places that were meaningful to him; that shaped him into the man she knew and loved.
it’s a feel-good little scrap of a novel, despite some unsavory revelations.
i wasn’t in love with clem as a character – it’s hard to feel sympathetic for a woman who has had every possible opportunity and still can’t get her shit together by twenty-freaking-seven. to say i didn’t like the character because i couldn’t relate to her is too easy, because how many of us are daughters of robert plant-caliber rock gods?? but even though i was mildly resentful of how feckless she was, there were still moments where i could appreciate her position, how it must be to live in the public eye through no choice of her own.
I started wondering why I’d come there. Why couldn’t I be allowed to be some girl in a bar? Not some Los Angeles poseur. Not some rock star’s kid. Just a girl in a bar.
and
From the outside, everything looks easy. But it never is, no matter who you are.
and this is true, but for all her moaning, it still seems pretty easy to be her. i mean, is it cynical of me to not buy that a rock star of that caliber would have remained so wide-eyed, spiritually pure, married to his first true love, unstintingly generous, loving his three kids unconditionally? there’s such an ozzie and harriet wholesomeness to this la rock-glam family that i have never seen in my casual tabloid-grazing. her life is without “real” obstacles and on this road trip, she talks to strangers at every port and every one of them is invariably fascinating and generous and kind and nothing bad ever happens to her.
except, obviously, her father’s passing.
which does bring up issues of public death vs. private grief, and how her mourning is more complicated than it seems, even when she goes unrecognized. in a record store, suddenly confronted with a giant picture of her own father as the store pays tribute to a man known only secondhand:
I held the edge of the picture of my dad and thought about how badly I wanted to repair him, me, everything. I wanted him to be back. I wanted him to never have felt so hurt. I could feel the cashier giving me the stink eye for staring soulfully at the cardboard figure of a man old enough to be my dad. I would be a little weirded out by me, too, if I didn’t know.
which, yes, it’s a weird situation to have strangers sharing your grief, even on a completely different scale, and you feel for her, but it’s hard not to feel as insulated from her situation as those people mourning the death of their idea of a man. at one point, clem witnesses a car crash, and it’s pretty much a mirroring of her character: she neither caused it to happen nor was injured by it. she was just sitting there at the side of the road, untouched.
this works well as a love letter to california itself, and road trip novels are always fun, but i didn’t think there was much tension to it, so it ultimately stayed in “this book is fine” territory. people who like family stories that are on the lighter side of, say, v.c. andrews, or new adult books that aren’t all tortured and full of MMA boys should like this.
and for this paragraph alone, which appeals to me on a common-sense level and hopefully takes root in others, it’s worth it:
That’s something I don’t really like about the chain bookstores. There is something disingenuous about those places where customers were made to feel as if the store just wants you to hang out and read books and drink coffee and be all Seattle, like you are sitting in someone’s immense, if rather oddly decorated, living room. This is an annoying kind of bullshit. The stores want –need – customers to buy the books. There is no casual way around that. I just want people to be honest about it. I like to think I want honesty out of people more than anything else. But I hate to admit that the real issue may be that I just don’t like weaving my way around people reclined in leather chairs while I try to find a Moroccan cookbook.
