Music suggestion for the reading: Ingrid Michaelson - The End of the World
I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with this piece. I love the literary description, the poetic feeling of sentences like "For a long while no one said anything--everything had already been said, over and over, one long flood of hurt and recrimination--and the antiseptic silence of the hospital held them in its grip while the rain beat at the windows and the machines at the food of the bed counted off numbers." What I really love is that this poetic structure is so powerful throughout the whole piece that I could just open the book and read a sentence at random and find such literary description.
I love the first paragraph. I love how it succinctly summarizes their relationship without making it seem either cliche or like he's telling us too much. I love how it is followed by a scene that proves everything the reader is told in that opening paragraph while still showing more about them and their relationship. In general, I love the structure of the piece, a structure that I would love to have as much mastery over as Boyle clearly does.
However, I hate the main characters of China and Jeremy. I hate them, not because they aren't realistic or well-rounded or even likeable, because they are so incredibly, annoyingly stupid. We have it established for us in the beginning that neither of them wants children, at least they don't want any anytime in the near future. "It became a running theme in their relationship, the breeders overpoplating an overpopulated world and ruining their own lives in the process." Knowing this, I find it hard to sympathize with either characters. I can't sympathize with a girl that doesn't want to go to a doctor or a clinic to get rid of this child she didn't want and then tells her boyfriend to get rid of it after she gives birth. I can't sympathize with a boy that doesn't use all the pressure in his power to get her to monitor her health and to make a decision, any kind of decision, about her pregnancy.
That being said, I still did enjoy the story for the most part. As much as I wished to strangle the characters for refusing to decide what they should do, especially considering that China seemed like the type of character that planned everything and understood long-term consequences, the constant raising of stakes and increased tension (combined with the wonderful structure of the piece) kept me reading. I also believe that I found the general progression of events after they killed the baby to satisfying.
Did you not find any sympathy for the two of them? It's certainly a challenge to make a likeable story about unlikeable people.
ReplyDelete(As a side note, I enjoyed the Ingrid Michaelson song.)
As a matter of fact, I actually did not find any sympathy towards the two of them. It came to quite the opposite actually, such as being glad to see them fail. That being said, if I really tried to muster some sympathy, I could feel some sort of pseudo-sympathy towards Jeremy. Overall, as a short story, there was enough intrigue that I would have finished the piece if I were reading it without any pressure to read it, but if they were characters in a novel, I would be unable to finish the piece.
Delete(Isn't it wonderful? I put it because I thought it would perfectly show the desperate attachment that China felt towards Jeremy, even after the "end of their world".)