** spoiler alert ** AFTER

Finally! After some seven months I finished listening to Bel Canto, and my friends, I am prepared to eat some serious crow. My earlier reservations remain intact, but what can I say, I have seen the light.

Somewhere halfway through this ambivalent little dance I'd been doing with Ms. Patchett, I started marveling at how I'd come to believe, wholeheartedly, in a world and in a set of actions, that should have been wholly unbelievable. The captives begin to fall in love with their captors, but the love does not go unrequited, indeed, the captors begin to love their captives. And this love takes many forms beyond that of romance; filial love emerges between the characters, religious love/awakening blooms, the love of one talent for another, the mentor and the mentee dynamic is delineated beautifully, the love of language, and time telling, and chess playing, and opera.

AND none of the above love emerges as a form of Stockholm Syndrome. The novel is brave enough to demand that we, the readers, abandon our preconceptions ands step boldly forward into a more complex, more complicated system than the ones we may have previously elaborated for ourselves when it comes to ideas about power and authority. There are almost no "bad guys" in this novel or truly unredeemable people.

In the end, the terror arrives in the form of the would be rescuers. The climax broke my heart. I had no idea how Patchett would see us through, the task seemed so impossible, but she deftly and piercingly nailed it.

I'm really in awe of so much of what she accomplished here, from her time management to her transitions to her world building to her handling of such an unruly ensemble cast, as it were. I finished the book on the plane to Rome, and when I finally did make it to Lucca, I had to remind myself that Roxanne and Gen and Simon and Edith weren't real people, and that I didn't need to share in their sadness, the novel was that persuasive.


BEFORE

Confession: I am listening to this book, not reading it in the old school sense. I listened to it trekking around the Sepulveda dam/basin with the mountains of the Valley rising up all around me and the herons gliding over the rehabilitated Los Angeles river. I listened to it speeding down the 405 to Newport Beach on Christmas Eve to see a friend I hadn't seen in years. I listened to it on the plane back to this awful frozen city while I crocheted a scarf I'll never finish. And now I listen to it at night in bed in the dark when I can't sleep and don't want to bother Jason. I've listened to it in all those ways and yet my feelings about it remain constant. For no legitimate reason whatsoever I have avoided reading this book ever since it burst on the scene, sealing Ann Patchett's stature as a leading literary light. I guess, unfairly, I thought of it as one of those literary books, like Julia Glass's Three Junes, which I have also never read, that readers who can't do challenging fiction love. Does that make any sense, beyond the snobbery? No!

Anyhoo, a good friend of mine from the MFA program, whom I respect greatly, loves this book, so I decided it would be my next Audible download. It is a good listen, which is a whole other category in its own right (not all great reads make great listens): the narrator is skilled and the narrative is compelling, despite the fact that so far, four hours into it, it all takes place in one room (a writing feat unto itself).

The premise is this: a group of international dignitaries and businessmen have gathered at the home of the vice president of an unnamed South American-ish country, to celebrate the birthday of a Sony-like Exec, whom the country is hoping to woo into opening a factory within their borders. The country has brought in the famed opera singer Roxanne Kass to sing, the exec's favorite, to seal the deal. In the middle of the party, terrorists storm the house and take everyone hostage.

The novel is an object lesson in the potential and power of a third person narrative. Ann Patchett's narrator is sneaky, subtle, unparalled at shifting from character to character and scene to scene. The transitions, the seams, are invisible. It is amazing in that way. Despite the inherent claustrophobia of the setting (one house) the book feels expansive and open, because of the narrative vision and scope.

However, I find the writing to be overly mannered (although I always read about Patchett's "effortless" and "gorgeous" prose). Also, the book feels flat to me, the characters who populate it feel stiff, more like beautiful paper dolls than flesh and blood individuals. Finally, every single man in the novel, from lowly terrorist to hero of capitalism, is in love with Roxanne Kass, which begins to feel a little... predictable? Boring? Patchett certainly hasn't done the work to make her believably singular, or to make us understand the power of her singing. Reading this sometimes feels too much like listening to one's male friends from high school drone on about that one pretty girl they all liked for no discernable reason beyond her great rack and hesitant smile.

I'll finish it, but more to out of curiosity to see how Patchett will unfold the next five hours than out of a great love for the book.