Another book, another terrible love interest. Can we talk about how everyone in this narrator’s life is simply awful? To begin with, she’s fifteen and a half when she meets and begins a sexual relationship with a twenty-seven-year-old man. When her mother discovers that she’s been skipping school so he can pick her up in his limousine, the reaction is barely a reaction at all. Instead, she says “even I, her own mother, can’t do anything about it, if I want to keep her I have to let her be free,” (71). There’s no outrage, no attempt to intervene, no sense that anyone is protecting her or cares about her at all.
Her family is atrocious. When they finally meet her lover, their response is pure opportunism. They make him take them out to dinners at expensive restaurants and then proceed to ignore him. It’s an uncomfortable scene, but it also captures the layers of power at work in the novel. In the racial hierarchy of the Vietnam at the time, her white brothers are supposedly above the lover, yet economically they are entirely dependent on him in that moment. He is the millionaire paying for the lavish dinner they themselves could never afford. Meanwhile, the mother simply falls asleep after.
I do understand what the novel is trying to do. It’s clearly concerned with memory, childhood, and the distortions that occur when someone looks back on their past from a distance. The hazy quality of the writing mirrors both the unreliability of memory and the atmosphere of the setting; the heavy heat and languid days in Saigon, where everything seems to blur together. Stylistically, I appreciated the disjointed structure of the novel. Sometimes the narrator spoke in first person, sometimes she was in third and I thought that was cool.
I also understand that the narrator wants to be seen. The gold shoes she wears, the man’s fedora, it’s her form of power, and her detachment suggests that she is the one in control. Maybe that distance is to show how memory transforms something painful into something less important, but almost aesthetic. (Do you think she loved her lover the way he loved her, or was she truly detached?) I also recognize that the story is semi-autobiographical, so maybe this Marguerite processing her strange past.
Despite knowing all of this, I could not look past the fact that she was very much still minor and I hated reading it.
4 replies on “The Lover (I Get It, I Just Don’t Like It)”
I am noticing a pattern and it seems like many of us could not get over the fact that the two characters had such a big age difference (myself included). I think this is why I did not enjoy the book as much. I just kept thinking about how uncomfortable it made me feel. Also, I appreciate your comment on the author’s stylistic choices. This is indeed a beautiful part of her work, though it did make me a bit confused while reading. Thank you for sharing!
Ugh yes I was so disappointed when her mother blamed her for being with “her lover.” She was a child and should not have been with a man 12 years older than her. The lack of a double standard is crazy! I would like to point out when there is no double standard, there seems to be misogyny at play… Also, I don’t think she loved him. She loved surviving, though.
Melissa:
I like your point on the idea of the narrator ‘wanting to be seen’. I also believe that she certainly isn’t cowering away from her past experiences, and that this may indicate how she was the one in control.
“It’s clearly concerned with memory, childhood, and the distortions that occur when someone looks back on their past from a distance. ” Along those same lines, we’ve already read several novels this semester that share these characteristics. Some might even say there are already too many novels like that! “I also understand that the narrator wants to be seen.” And she definitely wants to be read too.