The Engagement by Chloe Hooper
My rating: 3/5 cats
psst, there is a real review now…
blair has written an amazing review of this book and even though she liked it more than i did, reading her review made me like the book more just because i liked her review so much. and all of her reviews, honestly.
i will probably review this, but for now—read hers and give it a million votes, because it is grand.
okay, so now i will actually review this. but you should still give blair a lot of votes, because she liked this book a lot more than i did, and enthusiasm should always be rewarded, especially articulate enthusiasm, which is a skill set i am still learning.
objectively, this is a very good book. it attempts to do something quite tricky, and manages to pull it off with ease. we have an unreliable narrator coming up against a taciturn man in a story of sexual role-playing, extreme ambiguity, and a crumbling old mansion, with incredibly delicate writing and a truly remarkable ability when it comes to building tension.
subjectively, i say “meh.”
while i recognize that this is a very well-written book, it just didn’t move me as a reader. i had different expectations going into this book, (and so help me, if that dude from my harry turtledove review comes back here and tells me it is foolish to have expectations going into a book, as though we do not choose our books based on whether we think they will interest us, but instead just select them blindly from the shelves, knowing nothing, i will trepan him. i will.)
for me, i saw the words “grand, decaying mansion” in the jacket-copy, and i was sold. i am a fan of contemporary fiction that incorporates the traditions of the gothic. i like the overblown emotions that usually follow, the grand schemes, the bumps in the night…
this is different. this is the antithesis of gothic. this is more like marguerite duras, where you have angular, reserved characters circling each other in some sort of cliffs notes version of actual human emotion: calculating, cold, separate. and while liese is anything but angular, if you know what i mean, her emotions are. she may only be a call girl for one person, but she’s got the mentality down pat.
and the story is better than anything i have ever gotten out of duras, but it’s just not “me.”
i will say that it kept me guessing, i had no idea who was conning whom, and how the stakes would be raised, but at the same time, i didn’t really care, because the characters were so (intentionally) flat. there is a great deal of psychological interplay at work, and it is sort of fascinating, but there is just this distance that is hard to crack through.
but if you don’t go into this expecting a guilty-pleasure melodrama, you will probably like this a lot. like blair.
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