Review: The Golden Age

The Golden Age by Joan London
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Another completely pointless, bland book. Literary fiction will never stop being a mysterious puzzle to me.

Here's a book that goes into minute detail about EVERY. SINGLE. CHARACTER'S. APPEARANCE. Learn about freckles, stretchmarks, tans, scars, shapes, sizes, sags, clothing, adornments, ETC. Wow. Sheer literary brilliance obviously. Forgive me for being the dullard that spent most of this book thinking, 'but what is the point??!'

There's also something about two kids, in a hospital for polio patients, who fall in love. Apparently. Considering how much detail went into describing how people look, there was very sparse detail of anything else, including any kind of meaningful story.

The kid, Frank, considers himself a poet (and of course at 13/14 everything he thinks, feels and believes is absolutely true and shall remain so even as he grows, because no one ever develops and grows from who they were as a child) so there are a few random lines thrown in here and there, but nothing ever really amounts from it? It's important to him, but it still doesn't seem like a particularly strong part of the story?

Also a strange not-affair with Frank's father which somehow relates to his feelings towards Australia, and his wife.

I think this book must be so steeped in metaphor that it completely forgets to tell an actual story. There's really just no reason to read it. There's a little insight into polio in the early 50s but even that is kind of limited.

Also, I'm still mad that the author inserted a throwaway line about boys reading Spider-Man comics when Spidey didn't hit the scene til a decade later. The devil is in the details, my friends.

So I guess if you like seeing all the characters vividly but having to untangle what they're actually doing, this will be a winner for you. There are some feels here about immigration, and isolation, and weird, twisted love, but it's too 'literary' for my tastes, I'm afraid.

I'd rather rot my braincells with things that are actually fun.


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