Yes, I am behind in my reviews. Waaaaaay behind. I’m trying to catch up. My goal is two reviews a week until the end of the summer, and then we’ll see whether I’m any better situated.
Is there currently a glut of seniors wandering off books right now? Granted, I can only think of three, including this one (The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry and The 100 Year Old Man …), so glut might be a bit strong, but I can’t help thinking that we are currently obsessed with old people who simply get up and walk away, because, yes, in Etta and Otto and Russell and James, we have a senior, Etta, who gets up and walks away.
We’re in Canada, walking with Etta from Saskatchewan as she attempts to get to Halifax. She makes a coyote friend. The unrequited lover follows her. The husband waits. It’s three hundred pages but there is a lot of blank space. Negative space? Non-space? Amidst the blank lines, we have the beginning, a typical 1930s, 1940s prairie tale of one room schoolhouses and tractor accidents and dust and men going off to war and flat fields with red sunrises. It’s somewhat of a disservice to call this past-part a paint-by-numbers prairie novel, but it’s a paint-by-numbers prairie novel. Of course, that doesn’t mean the book isn’t genuinely affecting, but it’s sort of like a mild soap of a book. Unobjectionable. Less jaded people would use the word heartwarming.
Interspersed with then, the book has now, with Etta walking. She walks. I don’t know what else to say about that.
But the in-between is missing, obscured by the blank lines. There is the beginning, there is the end, but the middle? What happened between 1945 and now? Nothing Hooper felt worth noting as there is nary a mention of it. As I slide into middle age myself, I worry if that’s all I have to look forward to until I turn eighty? Just blankness, not even worth remembering? How sad.
There’s a metaphysical ending. Not a fan of those, but I know other people like the uncertainty, the non-requirement of closure. I think a lot of literary first novels, of which Etta and Otto and Russell and James is one, have endings like this. Maybe it’s writers still finding their way. I wished the ending was more solid and less ethereal though. And I wanted more about Owen, who was far more interesting than Otto ever was. Otto doesn’t even go after his wife. Sort of a lump.
Etta and Otto and Russell and James by Emma Hooper went on sale January 20, 2015.
I kind of received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review, in that they approved my request after the title was archived, so I couldn’t actually download it. Instead, I took a copy out of the library. I emailed Netgalley to ask what was up with that, but they never replied, so I don’t know.