I am working my way through the NY Times notable book list, starting with Julie Otsuka's book. This past week : Tom Perrotta's The Leftovers and Geoffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot.
When I began The Leftovers I was a little disappointed. It seemed like another of Perrotta's easy riffs on contemporary culture. Yet I kept reading and found myself engaged by the plot. The review in The New York Times gushed that Tl is "the best Twilight Zone episode you never saw." The novel is both bleak and funny and full of lovely, pithy sentences and sentiments. It isn't about character, but about society and situations and in this case, the rapture---or not. The use of religion as an explanatory force is one of the themes of the book.
So is it too easy and too fun? Or, (as some reviewers have hinted) is Tom Perrotta really inspired by Chekhov?
I kept thinking about this as I read The Marriage Plot. This, too, is more plot than character.
Like The Leftovers, this novel is clever, awash in details and long-winded sidetracks that burst from the verdant author-brain, from the zeitgeist, from the air. A passage giving background on a protagonist's father is a pastiche the includes a very minor character's "near sexual attraction to a chestnut mare named Riviera Red." The windup of this passage, and many others, is lots of fun. These walkabouts are loaded in precise and often meaningless detail that are enjoyable to read, and flesh out the context of the day (in Perrotta's novel, that is the present; in Eugenides' book, it is the early 1980s). All that said, Eugenides' novel felt flat. I didn't believe the characters or the situations, even while being entertained. Why? I don't know yet.
Perrota's novel stuck with me a bit more. The characterizations aren't fleshed out and there seems to be a reliance on sketches, rather than full development of people or ideas. Yet the writing worked. Here is what may be Chekhovian in all this. The descriptors are meant to give us verisimilitude, yet lend our invisible, omniscient narrator his power, as in a scene where a character is on the phone, yet as she speaks,"...the Great Dane next door bellowing..." applies the sheen of the quotidian about it all, gives us the real in the fiction.
Also, Chekhov gives us the human character, rather than an single individual. Perrota does this as well. However, Perrotta also, in his easy, pithy style, reminds me of Stephen King. Hmmm. Perhaps I'm wrong about all this and I will change my mind. For now, it's on to the next book.
