A few years ago, too late in life, I made an important decision: I would no longer finish a book I didn't like. That may not seem like a bold move to you, but after taking so many literature classes in college that I inadvertently ended up with an English degree, it was a hard habit to break.
((STOP: Hard Habit to Break by Chicago is an amazing song. Let's stop and appreciate.))
It should tell you how I feel about this book when I'd rather stop writing about it and talk about an early 90's Chicago ballad.
Anyway.
I made that decision because I was tired of wasting my time on books I didn't like. But, since I've begun this experiment of reading a book every week in 2017, I don't feel I can afford myself that luxury. If I decide I don't like the book on a Wednesday, it's really too late to start something new.
Nevertheless, she persisted.
That first line had so much promise. The idea that women learning to type exposed them to a world for which they were not ready. That the clunk and mechanics of that machine would slowly turn them away from the feminine. The story begins with a typist named Rose, who records confessions in a police precinct in the 1920's. If the author does anything well here, she really paints a picture of prohibition-era New York City and its inhabitants. You feel yourself in that dank, old brick precinct, where the men do the real police work and the women fade into the walls; they're only there for filing, typing and fetching coffee.
Rose describes herself as a plain, simple girl; she grew up in an orphanage and has moved slowly from one stage of life to another. Her black and white world shifts to color, however, when she describes the hiring of a new typist. Exotic Odalie has no use for what is proper. Rose immediately describes following Odalie down a rabbit hole of speakeasys and other questionable moral behavior until she crosses a threshold from which she cannot return.
Sounds promising, right? Yeah. Well.
That quote doesn't apply to most things in life, don't get me wrong. But, it applies to a book. By page 175 (of 354), I was incredulous and frustrated at the lack of any sort of movement in the plot. She had been foreshadowing since the early pages, which is completely acceptable. But, at this point, it was all talk and no action. I was beginning to wonder if the author was being paid by the word. Tiny, word-packed and completely unnecessary paragraphs stretched the exposition beyond all reasonable norms. I found myself skipping over entire paragraphs and still not missing a beat. I'm all for good prose, but not for the sake of additional sentences.
Around the time I started to lose my mind, I also zeroed in on what I thought would be the late plot twist. I was fairly certain at this point what the narrator was hiding. That made everything else that happened a lot more anti-climatic. Something similar happened when I figured out the plot twist of The Sixth Sense in the first half hour of the movie. It made everything else a lot less exciting.
In this book, I was wrong about the plot twist. I think. It comes so late in the book that you basically don't even care anymore. And by being so "creative" about it, the author actually confuses the reader more than rewards them for slogging through the slop to get there. The last line of the book intends to shock; it actually made me mad instead.
There are good things, structurally, here. The setting and characters were believable and vivid. The use of an unreliable narrative was compelling - at first. And, the writer clearly knows her subject matter. But, I think she tried to do too much. In that, she didn't do enough.
I should have known something was up when the blurb on the jacket invoked Gone Girl. Any book written after that thriller with a woman protagonist finds a way to reference it, which I find more of an annoyance than an endorsement. Looking back just now, this one actually says "If you liked Gone Girl, you might enjoy The Other Typist." I might enjoy a blow to the side of the head, too.
After this book (not good) and the last one (meh), I'm desperate for Book 20 of 2017 to redeem the whole experiment. I need it to rip. I hate that I haven't chosen it yet. Either way, it has to be better than this one.
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