Sometimes all you can do is fly away home...
When Sylvie Serfer met Richard Woodruff in law school, she had wild curls, wide hips, and lots of opinions. Decades later, Sylvie has remade herself as the ideal politician's wife - her hair dyed and straightened, her hippie-chick wardrobe replaced by tailored knit suits. At fifty-seven, she ruefully acknowledge that her job is staying twenty pounds thinner than she was in her twenties and tending to her husband, the senator.
Lizzie, the Woodruffs' younger daughter, is at twenty-four a recovering addict, whose mantra HALT (Hungary? Angry? Lonely? Tired?) helps her keep her life under control. Still, trouble always seems to find her. Her older sister, Diana, an emergency room physician, has everything Lizzie failed to achieve - a husband, a young son, the perfect home - and yet she's trapped in a loveless marriage. With temptation waiting in one of the ER's exam rooms, she finds herself craving more.
After Richard's extramarital affair makes headlines, the three women are drawn into the painful glare of national spotlight. Once the press conference is over, each is forced to reconsider her life, who she is and who she is meant to be.
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I'm not sure why I put Fly Away Home on my reading list. I think I saw it advertised on a subway poster. It was probably around the time of some sex scandal or another. Anyhow, I read it this past week. It's an alright book but it doesn't fill me with satisfaction, inspire any new realizations about life or leave me wanting more. In fact, I feel like this novel could have been at least a hundred pages shorter.
Porn anyone?
I don't think of myself as a prude but I found the sex scenes a bit too graphic, and they seemed to go on forever. At times I felt myself blushing and praying that no one in the subway car was reading over my shoulders. Weiner's sex scenes are comparable to the stuff I imagine would be found in a porn magazine.
Enough with the foreshadowing already!
Weiner goes over board with foreshadowing; she doesn't give the reader enough credit to pick up on hints. Almost every paragraph starts off with a flashback that inevitably foreshadows the main events of that chapter. In some cases this is good because it's a window into the relationship between the main characters but other times it's just too much. One of those times is when Lizzie discovers she's pregnant. Several pages are spent in a flashback of Lizzie and a high school friend smoking pot and watching I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant; both girls agree they would know if they were pregnant.
The characters are cliches:
- Cheating politician
- Devoted, wool suit wearing wife
- Successful but emotionally cold daughter
- Black sheep daughter
- Brash, Jewish mother
Sex Scandals
Society is saturated with sex scandals. Just this week, alone, two major scandals are in the headline. Former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger revealed the existence of a 10-year-old "love child" that he fathered with a former household staffer. International Monetary Fund Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested and charged with attempted rape. Admittedly, the Strauss-Kahn scandal is a criminal matter but it can still be classified under PEMS (Powerful Entitled Man Syndrome). In contrast to this week's news, the 'scandal' that is the centre of the Fly Away Home plot is boring.
2.5/5
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