October 1st, 2007
Review – Run
Run
by Ann Patchett
Ann Patchett has managed to take a potentially interesting topic and write a novel in which nothing of particular interest happens. Normally, we think of a novel as having some kind of conflict, some kind of challenge, or something that makes the main characters analyze the assumptions they have lived with until that point. But nothing like that happens in this story. The characters are confronted with a potentially challenging situation, meeting their birth mother, and they go hang out at the track, make their bed, and fall on the ice.
The story tells us about two young black men who were adopted as babies by a wealthy, political, white family in Boston. After an accident, the young men, now grown to college age, meet their birth mother, and a young girl who they assume is their sister, thus affording them the opportunity to analyze the pampered lives they have been able to live. Instead they whine and do stupid things like try to walk on ice with crutches the day after breaking a leg or dragging a sick old man out into the snow because he might be able to cure by touch. The story of their older brother, Sullivan, is never clarified so we never understand his motivations and that he made money by watering down medicine in Africa is treated as a minor character flaw.
All of this could possibly be forgiven if Ms. Patchett was a skilled descriptive writer but she really isn’t, at least not in this book. She is, to paraphrase the Modest Mouse song, pleased with herself for using so many verbs and nouns. But even generally the writing isn’t very good. For example, “From Teddy he had borrowed a parka and scarf and the sheepskin hat with earflaps that he had often ridiculed his brother for.” The entire sentence is strained and needlessly ends in a preposition (inserting “wearing” at the end improves things immensely). After reading this book, I would be willing to believe that Ms. Patchett had a very tight deadline and simply needed to get pages on her publisher’s desk. Perhaps next time her publisher could give her enough time to actually work a story out of her ideas.
Tags: book reviews, Ann Patchett
