Emily Giffin’s debut novel, Something Borrowed is my favorite modern fictional read. Period. I love how it shows a balanced, thoughtful, emotional account of infidelity, friendship, and the complexities of turning 30 with unrealized expectations…with flawed characters whose voices and backgrounds are varied and ring true.
It seems, though, that in each subsequent release, the narrators of Giffin’s stories become more cookie-cutter, more self-absorbed, more whiny. In fact, the first few chapters of Heart of the Matter were boring…too much exposition, to much ‘tell,’ flashback, character descriptions. What happened to letting us know the characters by their behaviors and actions? Honestly, I was thrown back to Sweet Valley High when Jessica and Elizabeth’s physical appearances, down to their aquamarine eyes and bronze, 5’6 California frames, were described in detail around page 6 of Every. Single. Book. (And yes, I read them all, thank you).
The storytelling formula of Heart of the Matter is a bit of a rehash of the one-two punch used for Something Borrowed and its sequel Something Blue, in that two characters narrate the same circumstances from their own points of view. In the first person voice we have Tessa, a former teacher married to hot plastic surgeon Nick, who quit her job after her second child was born to be a stay-at-home mom but has little security or joy in her role. She is constantly fretting over the approval of the other frustrated mommies who live in her Boston neighborhood, be it over her children’s store-bought Halloween costumes or what they bring for snack day. OK. Sadly, I admit I can relate a bit to this. But only a little. Tessa’s general discontent is dissected with her friend Cate, who is single and looking feverishly and lives in NYC, of course, and her other friend April, who is a perfect mommy and homemaker and has both a flair for the dramatic and a “bountiful fruit bowl.” I kid you not.
In the third person narrative, in every other chapter, we have Valerie, an attorney raising a 6 year old boy as a single mom, with the help of her gay-and-saintly twin brother and her bitter mom. Valerie, like Tessa, is seemingly attractive, skinny (which I have to believe makes life better), intelligent, and completely incapable of feeling anything but general malaise. Even the portrayal of her reaction to a serious accident involving her son is… yawn-inducing.
The two women are connected by mutual acquaintances and mitigating circumstances that become fairly obvious within the first 50 pages but don’t really get interesting until the last 50.
My first plea upon reading this story: Writers of “fiction for women,” PLEASE stop giving every mommy-protagonist a single BFF who is longing to have what the mommy has. Is it possible that some single women are happy with their lives? Is it possible some married mothers are best friends with… other married mothers? No one needs that cliche character in order to cultivate a random bar/hi-jinks plot excursion. Cate was unnecessary. Completely. (And don’t get me started on Romy. People DO have layers…even rich, entitled ones).
I found the character Valerie, because of what she exposed her child to, to be not nearly as sympathetic as she should have been. I found Tessa to be fairly bland. I found the re-appearance of two of my favorite characters from Gmy favorite Giffin storyline (I won’t name and spoil it) to be very exciting at first…but also… a little vanilla.
Though the story did improve as the pages turned, I am worried that Giffin has shown us all her tricks, kind of like Danielle Steel did with her first 2 or 3 of 8 million novels in which a successful blond woman moves across the country to pursue a man who will simultaneously excite her, call her by the name of a horse (I also plead guilty to friggen loving Palomino once upon a time), and break her heart. We have a lawyer…we have a competitiveness among well-to-do women…we have infidelity of some kind…we have a female character who basically has it all but is inexplicably unsatisfied over conditions she could change if she tried… Oh, and we have twins. (The last is not a bothersome recurring happenstance, but again, we get it. Giffin has twins…)
The relationship between Tessa’s bitterly divorced parents and the culmination of their past was my favorite moment in the book. I also appreciate that The Conflict was handled with sensitivity toward all parties involved; though the Nick’s motivation for The Conflict was not really hashed out, I give Giffin credit for again showing that bad deeds are not necessarily simplistic or malicious ones.
For once, though, I would appreciate a mommy story in which the mommies are not too busy trying to one-up each other and make their kids into organic-Stepford-moppets to actually support and advocate for one another. There was a great passage in the book in which Tessa describes all the things the mommies compare in each other… their husbands, their houses, their effectiveness as parents, the careers they may or may not have left behind, their problems. What I loved most about the passage was that the things listed were all things I discuss with my mommy friends…in a NON-critical or competitive way.
Why is it so hard for female novelists to give females credit?
I will continue to read Giffin, because she created Dex and Rachel and Darcy and Marcus and Hilary…but when the next novel comes out, I might be on the library’s waiting list instead of on the Amazon pre-order…
