Out Of Focus

Odd sort of day. Found myself with plenty of time on my hands and didn't quite know what to do with it. Couldn't read anything in a sustained fashion but skittishly kept jerking from one thing to another, though I did finish Anita Shreve's Testimony. I suppose the novel lends itself to a broken-up kind of  reading as it does the perspective thing - moving from viewpoint to viewpoint across quite a range of characters - and does it well, but anything that followed Ms Oates's blisteringly good The Tattooed Girl was likely to feel a bit inadequate and this did.
 
Funnily enough we've had at least two requests from students to work on Testimony as a text for an Extended Essay, both involving other supervisors who've then asked me for advice about this, and in each case we've put them off. It's a worthy enough novel but dealing as it does with a graphically described scandal concerning teenage sex in a private school I was of the opinion it's going to be difficult for any student to write about without feeling constrained if not extremely embarrassed about how to deal with such content. When I saw it going cheap just recently I sort of felt obliged to read it, rather than just going off the reviews I'd read, in order to make my recommendations. And now I have read it I feel reasonably vindicated insofar as in addition to the genuine problems involved in the embarrassment factor I don't think the writer finds anything of great weight to say on her subject. It read like a very good Hallmark movie for tv, if you see what I mean (though I think the channel's now called Diva.) I kept thinking she was going to surprise me about her characters and their motives, but she didn't, though she did keep me reading despite my lack of focus.
 
In case you're wondering, the poems of W.H. Auden kept pulling me away from the novel as did a compulsion to listen to the following: Blur's 13; the Faure Requiem (and other bits and pieces from the coolest Frenchman after Camus); The White Album, by you know who; Want Two, by Rufus Wainwright; and Stravinsky's Symphony in C. There, I told you I was skittish.