Elizabeth Bowen, 1938 Date Read: 8/10/22
The thing that stuck out most to me in this novel is how a 16-year-old girl was referred to as a "little kid" by adults in her life. I realize things have changed a lot between 1938 and today, but I am not entirely certain that girls really develop that much earlier today. So I'm wondering if the writer was trying to show that everyone infantalises Portia? I'm really not sure. I imagine contemporary readers would have recognized either 1) that was appropriate or 2) it was imagery but I'm reading this like, 96 years late.
Other than the question above, I didn't get this novel. The cover blub says, "A witty, lucid, and beautiful psychological novel" (someone at The New Yorker, apparently). I didn't get any of that out of this novel. It wasn't witty, like at all. Lucid...does that even apply to novels? Beautiful? No. Painful, more like. Psychological? Only in that the individuals involved did, evidently, have psyches.
In my opinion, it was just another novel of awful people being awful. A lot (a LOT) of the dialog is people talking at cross purposes and very hard to really understand (in that, I felt for Portia).
Length: 418 pages in Anchor Books paperback
ReReadable: kinda bleh really, so no
Classic: as my son would say, it was the World's Most Okayest
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