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Milena Billik's avatar

Your review has me thinking about something I see as a "deja vu effect" in today's culture (apologies for missing diacritics). I don't know how to make this observation not sound grumpy (so, I guess, I will also add an apology for that) but I think you are on to something when you point out that while Updike is now deeply uncool (has a male protagonist behaving badly in a marriage and thinking ill of women), July could be said to explore similar territory in her novel but with a protagonist more acceptable to contemporary audiences. I find it difficult not to think that "bad behavior" has been culturally cordoned off as a topic to be explored by some demographics and not others. I don't think it gets us to a particularly creative place, and in fact I think that it makes the whole concept of fiction less legible, uncomfortably tethered to artists' lives and things we can look up about them.

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Anna Heron's avatar

The other big inconsistency I thought was the best friendship - it seemed totally one-sided. I was waiting for a reckoning that never came.

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