distraction.....

ok, so thursday before i met andrew for supper i managed to glean a few selected items from the boston road goodwill.......mostly books.......a book by toni morrison called pale blue eyes......a slim volume of poetry that claimed to recall a southern boyhood.....and some quality paperbacks......a map of the world by jane hamilton....and the last time they met by anita shreve........i had been reading white teeth by zadie smith.....but put it down to read the anita shreve book because i liked the cover.....yeah...that is so shallow a reason.....and having finished it this afternoon......may i say that i have come to dislike novels that overutilize flashbacks.....there is such a thing as too many flashbacks...to the degree that the story line is weighted down by the rememberance of things past.......we all have baggage, emotional and otherwise....but that baggage can only be divested when it is confronted in the present rather than stirred up from the past.....ironically this particular novel had an entire section at the back with book club questions....and several interveiws with the author...as if it was assumed that this story would be so compelling that middleaged women like myself would insist that their bookclubs take up this book as meaning something more profound than i was able to glean from the hours spent in holding it.......as a work of fiction it tried so hard to be a good story......and it could have been if the flashbacks were slashed and reworked into realtime conversation/disclosure/confessions.........the suthor had it all set up well.....a chance meeting at a writers conference of two people who had failed to resolve their 35 years of issues......but the flashbacks truly got in the way............and i was confused and ultimately compelled to skip over much of the second half to the end...where i was disappointed...............enough of this book......let me go back to white teeth.......which has its own flaws....but in comparison these little ticks are minor and from now on i will overlook them............