Posted by Astronommy 4 years ago Report

Perfection.

The sum of the exploratory precedent in the story to this point has just got ripe enough for this careful, circumspect bottom-lining to take place, and having Alison walk Claire through this is a perfect choice, too. A little sad the Kim couldn't be there, but it's a super-friend level emergency rescue during work hours, and anything but a tête-à-tête would have been wrong: Claire's too tangled up in heartbreak for a healthy introspective meditation, and three would be a crowd. The grey, moody and monotonous, yet inherently stressful highway drive is a perfect backdrop for the chapter's grand soulsearching dance.

Clairebear is painfully sympathetic here as a nominally-fierce, now panda-eyed she-wolf curled up and whimpering in a desolate cave lair. Alison drives a brilliant and needed tough love prosecution of Claire's pride and hesitancy to change her ways when the golden opportunity for happiness calls for that. Claire's initial faint defensive stonewalling and wallowing in self-pity were perfectly natural for her.

But that's going by the heroine's standards, of course; I'd absolutely give up and marry my face to the pillow for the next month if I'd been in her shoes in that car, expecting a formal apology from the universe that would never come. How lucky for Claire that it's her who's in her shoes!

Despite the sense of predetermined outcome, the brutality conga of the last chapter have been very convincing that everything may fall through for the Carver-Schwartzes, after all.

The negotiative contemplation of what love is is very stimulating and useful, never trite or lacking in the awareness of how both over-represented and over-defined the subject is in the human culture; it would be certainly enough to salvage the concept for many of those who might have brushed it aside as the exact kind of Hallmark-Disney childlike fantasy. The more recent discussions of love have focused on it requiring hard work for all parties, and being hard work, so very close to Claire's position, I guess, and I like Alison's reminder that there needs to be a liberating, casual feeling to it, that it's not a grueling ordeal with a potentially unreachable rewards at the end, but rather something enjoyable, and appealing, from the start -- not just the obvious gratification, but also the integration of that basic enjoyment into the value of the experience.

Cameron Crowe takes the stage yet again, putting me to burning shame for not having seen a single of his films, and being only aware of them by the juicy meme-excerpts, like the overhead boombox or the Tom Cruise strangling scene.

The meta-connectivity coefficient of the chapter's title is off the charts, both because of the SNL meme, and the deeper connection to Claire's present state and relationship management tactics, and to the theme of the story as well!

Posted by 4ofSwords 4 years ago Report

It is always in poor taste to argue with compliments, but I have dubious taste. And I definitely don't say this to fish for reassurance, but I'm really unhappy with Alison's philosophizing.

There -is- something there that may be valuable, and that I at least think is worth saying, but it's so lost in the muddle and confusion of tying different conversations together. In that sense it may be more like realistic dialog, especially while driving and trying to console a friend whose thoughts are skipping around, but when it comes to dialog especially, fiction prefers veracity over realism.

I am visualizing it as a movie, and playing the part of a reviewer huffing and rolling his/her eyes (let's face it: His. He's mid-fifties. Bearded. Well-versed in culture, but not particularly successfully creative outside of meta-analysis.) and declaring that, "The quasi-climax of Claire's car ride is meant to be a revelatory experience that catapults her from self-doubt into confident action, but amounts to more of a 'Deux ex Monologue' as we listen to her friend prattle on for nearly seven minutes with a Clerks-esque pseudo-intellectual diatribe that circles around nothing in particular and yet somehow leaves Claire with 'Clairity'. Bonus points are awarded for Claire's inability to detect that she is the object of Alison's hypocritically unspoken one-sided lesbian love affair; dissections of love are always more palatable when flavored with cynicism. C+. Wait for Netflix."

Posted by 4ofSwords 4 years ago Report

(That said, at some point I would like to come back and clean up this chapter. It has a glimmer of promise, and I just had some bad timing both when writing and editing, as far as ability to give it my full attention went.)

Posted by Astronommy 4 years ago Report

Sorry to hear your post-production process has to be dipping and weaving between other everyday committals!

Posted by Astronommy 4 years ago Report

(She is exactly fourty-seven. Dark violent-dyed cornrows with occasional grey. Was at one point harassed away from writing a mildly-successful niche YA adventure book series by incoherent accusations of it being bland and culturally insensitive. Took up creative writing theory and immersed herself into the social media scene while in exile. Tried and failed getting back into writing, finding herself incapable of adapting her style to her new, stricter sensibilities. Harbors disdain for critics and a soft spot for amateur creators as a result.)

"I would like to sincerely apologize to anyone having had the misfortune of getting swept along by the above review on behalf of the entire field of freelance art critique.

There's a lot to unpack here!

One, as this modernized style is clearly meant to be enjoyed in discrete portions on commutes and lunch breaks, the emotional arc of each chapter is more important to resolve than the overarching story goals; every mood, every new environment has to be fully played out by the end of the brief word count, and sometimes a mood will ask the plot imperatives to wait in the corridor for a little while.

Second, and on a related note -- Claire cannot be *given* clarity, or be catapulted into anything, by any other character, and definitely not in such a short order! It would be contrary to her central conflict, within or without -- her need to exert control for protect herself from hurt, and as a way of expressing her inner truth. In order to let her keep her agency, she could only be given a space to reorient herself, like a houseplant after its moved out of the dark, dry corner and onto the sunlit window sill. I am honestly having doubts my colleague had done more than skim the already sparingly diminutive chapter before proceeding to opine.

'Circles around nothing in particular,' they write, forgetting entirely about the near-inciting incident spiel about love at the close of Claire and Adam's first date, as well as the mutually echoed lamentations of each one of them on how uniquely difficult they were for other people to truly appreciate -- again, the focal issues of the novel -- that were woven together into a single thread in this chapter.

Alison swats away the setting in fatalistic resignation in her bestie's mind with three firm, but compassionate bats: she forces Claire to confront her part in endangering her relationship (calling back to the opening falling out with Jaime -- always important to retread the remote parts in this format!); she helps Claire find better words for her personal brand of love, and reject the socially-conditioned version; and her last message is moving on from the abstract to the practical application of her new perspective.

Three soothing sitar chords:

'Here what you're doing wrong, but that's not you.'
'Here's what you really are (and it's good!)'
'Here's what you can do with it.'

It couldn't be clearer, and Claire recognizes that:

'Yes. Like that. Exactly!' -- there is your 'Clarity', right there!

And lastly, I for the life of me cannot pick up on the 'lesbian love affair' tells my colleague is evidently so adept at discerning; credit where credit is due! Alison the Quasiromantic, seeking relationship fulfilment entirely vicariously, I could see; a greysexual social psychology nerd delighting in Claire's trial and triumphs like an astronomer playing shipping games with planets, maybe; as a lesbian, I could barely just see her with the insultingly neglected Kim, possibly, but with Claire? Who is, for all her actress-mode Leo-nine self-absorbed grandiosity, would still be enough of a paranoid Scorpio to pick up on *those* cues? Alison going gooey at the last part might have been a ringer, but hopeless devotees don't dare going *that* deep into managing their idol's affections. Not every seemingly unbound woman wears a Labrys 'cross her breast, you guys! (Not to discourage the representation of my lovely sapphic sisters!)

In summation, don't be discouraged by format quirks, or subtleties of character motivations when deciding on whether to pick up this story for your e-bookshelf; we are all mysterious each in our own way, and this story does splendid job showing -- and telling, it's important to talk some things through -- how that can be a blessing and an impediment; more of a former, I should hope, for the heroine's sake!'

But you should absolutely dismiss my obsequious crooning! I only feel confident enough to point out what I see as flaws for works that I could write a better version of, and your works have consistently been setting new watermarks in my grading system for fiction quality.

Posted by 4ofSwords 4 years ago Report

Well, I'll admit that your reviewer sounds much more hip and isn't as prone to pun-usage, so I trust her more already than my Leonard Maltin ripoff. ;)

Posted by Astronommy 4 years ago Report

And now I am forced to argue with your kind words, rendering my counterpoint hypocritical and moot if I do, or dying of shame if I don't. How very diabolical of you! Kudos.

And thanks! (I predictably embrace oblivion.)

Not familiar with Mr. Maltin's oeuvre (nor am I with that of any critics, with the partial exception of the late Roger Ebert), but his Guinness Records entry speaks volumes, and I see how he was an ideal target for you to satirize!

I maintain that Alison's pep talk is great here, even if it may look ungainly in the hindsight. But those are big, tough-to-compress ideas! And Claire is drowning in seas of runny makeup at this point, too! Maybe the larger chunks of her semi-monologue could be broken up into more conversationally-sounding tidbits, perhaps with Alison making Claire's points and arguing with them, but I don't know how that could be done.

It reads well, tugs at the right strings, and delivers its insightful payload deftly for punters like me, for what it's worth.

Posted by Sauvegarde 3 years ago Report

Disney in particular, and traditional media in general, are unbelievably shitty with matters of love.

They always sell the same stale tale of two people on equal footing, in the kind of sweetish relationships where one finish the sentence of the other and so on. It makes me sick at a visceral level and I'm not the only one.

You know the "nice guy" syndrome? They play a part in that. Since relationships are intimate and more or less taboo, the piss poor romance stories we get fed by TV constitute a de facto framework of reference. With the bleak consequences we know.

Anyway, Allison is a real treasure here. Claire is lucky to have her.

Posted by 4ofSwords 3 years ago Report

On the other hand, I'm not as sure Alison is lucky to have Claire. But love isn't always sensible that way.