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April 21, 2004

Maslin Watch: Good Grief

by Ron Hogan

Maslin considers Good Grief, which Jennifer Weiner assured me a while back I should read, when I queried her about her blurb. I mention this because of Maslin's opening remarks:

Good Grief is a novel that would dearly like to be The Lovely Bones. So Lolly Winston treats matters of life and death with such incongruous lightness that the book's cover (in pretty, eye-catching, Bones-like hues) features a pair of bunny-rabbit slippers.

Now, I'm still waiting for a copy of the novel, so I can't say much about its content, but if we might be permitted to judge a book by its cover for a moment--and apparently Maslin has given us leave--the comparison I would make is not to Alice Sebold but to Weiner...because the extreme close-up on the legs and feet is stylistically similar to the cover on her debut, Good in Bed. And my impression all along has been that, far from the semi-mystical tone of The Lovely Bones, Winston might be aiming more for the more ordinary chick-littish paradigm of examining a female protagonist's all-too-human responses to setbacks and tragedies as she slowly, but surely, gets back on her (bunny-slippered) feet.

"It's funny how you don't have to be related to someone to love them like family," Sophie eventually realizes, with Crystal in mind. Now there's a line to excite Lynne Truss, the grammar policewoman whose Eats, Shoots & Leaves has also become popular [and also reviewed by Maslin]. In addition to its faulty construction...

Just goes to show, I never particularly thought of "It's funny how..." as a faulty construction, but I suppose, looking at it closely, that it is, and "that" should be used in place of "how." But isn't Lynne Truss actually all about punctuation?

Comments

It's "someone" not agreeing with "them" that I think Maslin is referring to. Which, while incorrect, still has nothing to do with punctuation...

Posted by: Jimmy Beck at April 21, 2004 10:01 AM

Ahhh, now I see it. That persnickety use of "they" and "them" for the gender-neutral third person singular!

Posted by: editor at April 21, 2004 10:10 AM
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