2 A.M. at the Cat's Pajamas by Marie-Helene Bertino

Have you ever wondered if the people who write the blurbs on the back of the book read the same book you are reading? This one said I would be laughing out loud. Here are several reasons why this novel didn't even elicit so much as a mild chuckle.

First, I am a grammar nerd; I want my books to be grammatically correct. However, there are two exceptions to this rule:

1) When it's used to illustrate character.
I'll admit it, I'm a sloppy speaker. There's just so many subjects, verbs, objects, contractions, consonants, vowels, diphthongs - and when you're from East Texas like I am, there are about 500 more acceptable diphthongs than in the rest of the English-speaking world. It's just a matter of expediency. Let's say you and I are kicking back, drinking a couple of margaritas, having a bit of a chat. I hardly expect either of us to be fastidious in the grammar department, especially when the margaritas have been flowing for a while. So the way a character speaks says a lot about him or her, although it may not be the truth. However, the grammatical stunts in this novel are in the narrative, not the dialogue. That doesn't tell me anything about the characters, it tells me more about the author.

2) When it's used to set the pacing of a section.
Dropping grammatical structure can show that things are going so fast in a character's life they can't even keep up. It adds to the immediacy of the moment. For example, in this novel there are sections where the characters are moving through the city. Here's just one example where the main character, Madeleine, is running through Philadelphia after learning there's a jazz club somewhere in the city. Here's the exact quote:

This is what she does not notice because she is distracted: the spice shop's jars of marzipan, kookaburra, Chinese five-spice, mace and coriander, the punching bags of provolone hanging at the cheese shop, the extended yowls of the dried stock fish, hanging in bunches of dead. Normally Madeleine would yowl back at them but she is replaying exactly what they said about The Cat's Pajamas, so she is too busy to notice the crates of pecans pinned by brass shovels, two pounds for five dollars, the curling snakes of apple sausages, dollar-a-bag candy, gossiping housewives, so and so, and so and so. Madeleine passes the barrels of fire, the grocer weighing spinach on a tipsy scale. She accelerates at the store with the ducks, meadow green avocados, a bluster of brooms, a fire hydrant, the pears, more ducks, she is running, statues, soda, birds, nuts, she turns into Santiago's alley, upsetting a cart of Virgin Mary statuettes.

That introductory sentence. It's so unwieldy and unnecessary, like putting a parka over a silky sheath of a dress. Once over that hurdle, though, the images are thrown out - some of them awesome - and I felt like I was running right along beside her. However, every time the author uses this method, it's exactly the same, and it quickly becomes trite.

When authors ignore grammar for whatever reason, it pulls me out of the narrative. The more frequent the infractions, the less likely I am to fully enjoy the story.

Second, the author makes a couple of bizarre choices in the style of her narrative that just seem totally at random to the rest of the novel. Each chapter is a different time during the night. Suddenly, inexplicably, she goes backward for a few minutes. The only point to the device seems to be to ruin the punchlines of some pretty awful jokes. She then resumes the chronological process. The worst, though, is the ending. I won't spoil it in case you actually want to read this (although I don't advise it). The author switches to magical realism. I have nothing against magical realism, honestly, but when you are reading a straightforward novel and the author throws that in at the end, it is horribly jolting. This is the impression you want to leave me with?

Somewhere toward the end I think I finally worked out what bothered me the most. I suddenly felt that this writing style felt awfully like Virginia Woolf. I'm not a fan of Woolf, but it seems kind of presumptuous to mimic her. The author just seems to be trying too hard, and honestly, more than anything else, I have the biggest problem with people who are simply trying too hard to be an "artist."