Robert Wilder (2) (1901–1974)

The sensationalistic description on the cover worried me, and the beginning did not really grab me. The blurb on the front wasn't even as bad as on the cover shown on Goodreads.

the edition shown on Goodreads:

Robert Wilder's explosive novel of a woman who traded love for sex and sex for power.

(This was a thoroughly misleading description, by the way.)

the edition I read:

Robert Wilder's sensational exploration of a woman -- deadly as dynamite, fascinating as fire!

(This was a somewhat misleading description, but not as much as the other version.)

One might get the impression this book is the depression and WWII era literary equivalent of Barbarella, or some other '60s and '70s softcore pseudo-porn. It turns out that's not the case.

Its movements between "present" and flashbacks was vague, unfocused, and sometimes recognizable only in retrospect a couple pages after it happened. A fair bit more of the writing was "tell, don't show" than I like.

After a bit of a slow start, though, I started enjoying it more and more as I went. There was a moment when the main character behaved in a way that I found a little off-putting, in response to a hiccup in her romantic life, but I found the way she "got over it" a very interesting progression of events. There was much to like about the character, including her ability to recognize her failures after the fact and how she dealt with them (not always in a good way).

Pretty much with the introduction of FDR as some kind of overshadowing, cartoonishly heroic force in the background, the story started going inexorably downhill. The simplistic (even simple-minded) handling of US politics was disappointing, the main character's gradual loss of personality as presented in the narrative, and the increasing tendency of the writing to "tell, don't show" with lengthy expositional infodumps about what happened in the main character's life worked fairly well to suck the life out of the novel as it went on. I found I could not tell, after the introduction of FDR's specter, whether the author intended to portray the main character's professional pursuits and achievements in a positive or negative light most of the time, but it was stupendously obvious it was always meant to be one of those things.

The character who, in the end, obviously had the second-most significant influence on the course of the main character's life (after her father) got some focus as the perspective character in a small number of narrative segues later in the book, and they illustrated something about why he did or did not do some things that might otherwise be uncertain (if only viewed from the main character's perspective), but the momentary focus on him at those times felt weirdly out of place. It seemed as though there either should have been more, making him almost an equal partner in the focus of the story in the latter half of the book, or less, to avoid distracting from the main character's development with those tangents.

At times, the author's portrayal of the main character made her seem almost Mary-Sue-ish, except that she did things to the world rather than letting the world give everything to her. At other times, she seemed like a thoroughly reprehensible, villainous personage. At still others, she seemed just sad, pitiable, and lackluster. Even her heroic moments were touched with some sordidness, even her evils came across as pitiable, and even her bleached-out pathetic moments seemed intended to make her somehow larger than life.

The end might have been intended to provide some kind of "we can't escape our parentage" wink-and-nudge, except it was ham-handed. It might have been some kind of "the villainess gets her comeuppance", except she seemed poised to try to make up for her past. It might have come across as a turning toward the way things "should have been" in some way, but it came off as hackneyed and threadbare, and left the impression she could descend into delirium and death at any moment.

The condition of the main character at the end of the novel seemed somewhat like the story itself after it had most of the meat scraped off it over the course of preceding chapters: without particular vigor, excitement, engagement, or absorbing interest, holding on until the bitter end by virtue of sheer meanness (in both senses of the term). Maybe the author felt that way about it himself, and just doggedly worried at it until it was done so he could earn his advance and move on to writing something else, after having lost interest in the story; it certainly came across like the author could have written an ending like this when all the joy had gone out of it.

It wasn't an excruciating read, and I rather liked some of it (near-beginning through the middle, perhaps), but if I had known what I would think of it before I started I would have given this book a pass altogether.… (mer)