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Title: All Is Vanity (Ballantine Reader's Circle) by CHRISTINA SCHWARZ ISBN: 0-345-43911-2 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 04 November, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.21 (39 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: A midlife morality tale
Comment: Margaret and Letty live out the fantasies of many people who, in midlife, seek career and life coaching. Ignoring the shelves of self-help books, the thousands of websites of potential helpers, they take the plunge and never recover.
Margaret, who teaches English in a Manhattan private school, begins to wonder, "Where has my life gone?" Like many midlife career changers who ask this question for the first time, she wants an instant answer.And she comes up with one: She will take a year off and write a best-selling novel.
Never mind the reality: she has never sold so much as a short story. She has no idea where to begin. She has no back-up plan and no idea what it's like to stay home chained to a word processor.
Let the folly commence! and it does.
Author Schwarz mericlessly shows Margaret's creative ways to avoid her self-chosen mission: cleaning the house, painting the walls, buying multicolored pencils, even buying a book of names to bestow appropriate descriptors on her soon-to-be-created characters.
And she unerringly portrays the advice given to wannabe writers from those who have never written a line: "I read that Hemingway always left his work in mid-sentence;" "Write the first third and the rest will be easier," and more.
Schwarz accurately depicts what happens to those who blithely jump into a dream without a well-crafted safety net. Doors mysteriously close and bank accounts disappear faster than you expect. I am, however, surprised that Margaret's budget-driven husband would support this venture. Ted keeps detailed "ledgers" and has a knack for asking penetrating questions. How did he miss the big one?
Meanwhile, Letty, in Los Angeles, succumbs to her husband's new job and dazzling new salary. Always carefree with their spending, the couple happily builds their dream on a foundation of plastic.
Letty's new world appears, finely detailed, through her emails. Margaret helps herself to Letty's writing talent which, we soon realize, is probably greater than Margaret's own.
Letty's greed and concern with image seems realistic and inevitable: a naive housewife plunged into a world she can't comprehend, where she doesn't know how to say "no."
Yet what I can't understand is why Letty keeps turning to Margaret, in a world where therapists abound on every corner. And a couple in their income bracket would be expected to have a financial planner. Then again, perhaps they moved too fast to learn the ropes along the way. Often midlife career changers brag about how much they earned but when asked, "How long can you live before you lose the house?" they sheepishly say, "I've saved up three months," or even, "Maybe a week or two."
Margaret tries to help Letty, with predictable results. Soon Letty seizes what seems to be an unexpected windfall, and both friends are condemned (in one case, literally) to live out the consequences of their decisions.
The end seems fast and unsatisfying, with no hope of redemption or growth for either character. In the end, despite the smooth writing, deft chaacterization and finely drawn settings, this novel seems more a morality tale than serious literary fiction.
Rating: 1
Summary: Drowning in Vanity
Comment: As Margaret, our narrator, ruins several lives in her efforts to get her novel published, it becomes quite clear that All is Vanity would never have earned publication without the success of Drowning Ruth. While Ruth is suspenseful, I had difficulty even getting through Vanity. The characters are annoying and nearly impossible to empathize with, and become more and more despicable with each passing page. Wholly unsatisfying.
Rating: 2
Summary: good beginning, strange middle, weird ending
Comment: Schwarz is no doubt a fairly good writer - the book was well and interestingly written until about 2/3 of the way.
She knows how to draw realistic, likeable and interesting women but she has no feel for the male characters. Ted comes across as just a numbers cruncher - surely an intelligent woman like Margaret cannot be satisfied living with this boring lump. As for Michael, he is so one-dimensional as to be totally unbelievable and he has no backbone whatsoever. Schwarz's male characters seem to exist as cardboard cutouts in the background somewhere and their only purpose is to render one-liners to their spouses here and there to make the story more believable.
I found it even more unlikely that the very bright Letty could live with and admire someone of this calibre.
I did enjoy the use of e-mails and could really "see" Letty through her writing of them. She seems like the kind of person I would admire and want to be friendly with.
Schwarz is very moralistic and the story had a weird and strangely unsatisfying ending. I would not rush out to buy her next book.
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Title: The Center of Everything by Laura Moriarty ISBN: 1401300316 Publisher: Hyperion Pub. Date: 02 July, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: Drowning Ruth (Oprah's Book Club) by CHRISTINA SCHWARZ ISBN: 0345439104 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 31 July, 2001 |
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Title: Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman by Elizabeth Buchan ISBN: 0142003727 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 30 December, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Family History by DANI SHAPIRO ISBN: 0375415475 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 01 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.00 |
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Title: Mrs. Kimble : A Novel by Jennifer Haigh ISBN: 0060509406 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 06 January, 2004 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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