Word: alvarez
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...more often, Alvarez's characters simply have nothing to say. Lack of raw imagination is no mortal sin, and there are other things to build novels on. But the sheer vacuousness of this book often verges on self-parody doubly so because the narrator is always there, reading off every inane thought. This from Sam, during fellatio...
...ALVAREZ'S problems is that when he has something to say, all he can do is say it. When he wants a character to feel intruded upon, he manages it by narrative fiat: "he felt intruded upon." When Julie feels uncertain about herself, she looks in the mirror...
...doesn't have to say it out loud, either. Alvarez has no sense of narrative perspective; his omniscient narrator flits aimlessly in and out of the minds of his characters...
...Alvarez's lesser characterizations range from the empty to the offensive. Sam's mother, making a brief appearance for the sake of color, is Jewish; her first four lines...
Julie herself is as shallow as she is transparent, and Alvarez seems uneasily aware of it. He is continually describing her as "thin," "pale," "delicate," "Incorporeal" as if he would like to blame her when she fails to come off the page as a fully fleshed-out human being. She seems thin, he is trying to say, but there is really something to her. It doesn't work. In this book we can be sure that anything we don't know, Alvarez doesn't know either...