Falling Short

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is a hard book to review without giving away the central twist - a twist which, I have to say, hit me with all the force and surprise that Karen Joy Fowler was surely aiming for. Wow! I thought, and read on avidly, only to find my interest dwindling.

I think that's the problem with a story that relies too much on One Big Twist. You can imagine it sounding great when the novel is pitched, but if too much hangs on a single peg then that peg can get overloaded. And instead of being free to let the characters and narrative blossom, the author finds him or herself boxed in by the single, supposedly great, idea. I think that's what happened here. I kept willing the characters to really come alive, grow into themselves, find resolutions genuinely connected to the lives of credible humans. Instead it became a zigagging plot-line, as if Karen Joy Fowler was looking for a way out that she never quite found.

That said, it is such an usual book, and the scientific background is admirably researched, and the Big Twist - for all its problems - did get me thinking about stuff I hadn't thought about before, and so I felt it would be churlish to give 'We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves' anything less than three stars.
As a novel, however, it does not quite work. There is too much plotting and not enough story; too much telling and not enough showing; by the end I felt so disengaged from the characters that I didn't really care what happened to them. I am sorry if that sounds harsh, but truly powerful novels are hard to pull off and for me this one fell well short of the mark.



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