I'm not one of those people who loved The Time Traveler's Wife. I couldn't buy into the idea of accidental time travel, and I didn't identify with any of the characters in the book. In fact, I downright disliked them all.
Based on this, it is surprising that I decided to read
Audrey Niffenegger's second novel, Her Fearful Symmetry.
It was passed on to me by my co-worker, who couldn't get into it and decided to give up on it. Since the premise dealt with a ghost rather than a time traveler, I decided to give it a shot. Bad decision.
(if you don't want spoilers, stop reading)
The book begins with a British woman in a London hospital dying of cancer. Her name is ELSPATH. I should have stopped reading based on that pretentious, absurd name alone. I didn't. Elspath soon dies, and leaves her flat and a sizeable amount of money to her American nieces living in Chicago, the twin daughters of Elspath's sister Edie, whom she hasn't seen in 20 years. In her will, she stipulates that the girls must live in the flat for an entire year before being allowed to sell it, and their parents are never allowed to set foot in the place.
The twins, Julia and Valentina, are 20 year-old thrice college droputs. They spend their time dressing
exactly alike, sharing a room in their parent's house and sleeping in the same bed. You read all of that correctly.
Since they have nothing better to do and their parents don't try to stop them, they pick up and move to London on their 21st birthday. They make this trip dressed head to toe in matching, entirely white outfits, and hold hands walking through the airport.
Upon arrival, they learn from their aunt's lawyer/will executor that Elspath's lover Robert lives in the same building and will be available should they have any questions. Robert is an intellectual who spends his days hiding from the girls, writing his thesis and giving tours at the local cemetery (also the focus of the thesis). Once again, Niffenegger's "leading man" is a bookish, pale brunette with little glasses. HOT, right? Thoughout the book, Robert seems to have no friends/family but for the elderly people he works with at the cemetery and the obsessive-compulsive crossword-puzzle writer who lives in the third apartment in the building.
Long story short: Elspath's soul is trapped in the apartment, and she haunts the girls, but eventually they communicate daily, play games, and co-habitate. Robert alternates between falling for Valentina and trying to communicate with the dead. Julia spends her days obsessed with her sister, insisting that they dress alike, sleep together, not go to school and generally refrain from having any healthy relationship with anyone but each other (and their dead aunt, the ghost, of course). Valentina spends her days having panic & asthma attacks in the subway, swooning over Robert, distancing herself from Julia, fixating on her dead aunt and adopting a stray cat. Because OF COURSE in a book like this, they're all cat people.
If the characters weren't such absolutely useless losers, the story itself may have been somewhat enjoyable, but once again I found it impossible to like any of them. It wasn't even the situations they were in that were the least believeable - it was the characters themselves. 21 year-old women dressing exactly alike everywhere they go and sleeping in the same bed, and we're supposed to buy that this is 'normal' because they're twins? Bullshit.
I think my problem isn't the book itself - it's the author. She sticks to a template:
-- an unrealistic premise
-- set in/partly in Chicago
-- destined-to-fail love story between a beautiful woman and a brown-haired, Lennon-glasses-wearing bookworm of a man
-- and of course, cats
I disdain it, and this time I'm not going to give Niffenegger's writing another chance. And really, what kind of asshole uses a photo like that for their publicity shot? The kind of asshole that wrote this book, that's who.
