Julie Ehlers’s review of Vinegar Girl

I admit that I've never read The Taming of the Shrew. I couldn't even make it all the way through the Wikipedia synopsis before I had to give up in confusion--all those Shakespearean concealed identities may work on the stage, but not in summary. So perhaps I'm not the best person to review this book; there are probably callbacks to the play that I'm completely missing. On the other hand, I firmly believe that these novelistic "reimaginings" should work as novels all on their own. You may get more out of Bridget Jones's Diary, for instance, when you know that it's based on Pride and Prejudice, but it's still a fully realized comic novel all on its own. Vinegar Girl, on the other hand... isn't. Caution: unfocused ranting ahead!

(view spoiler)[Let's start with Kate, the "shrew" in question. Kate is 29 and still lives with her father. She was kicked out of college as a freshman for calling a professor's lecture "half-assed" (oooh, so rebellious!) and could have gone back the following year, but didn't. Instead, still lives at home with her father and younger sister, works at a job she hates and isn't suited for, has no friends or love interests, no actual interests besides gardening, and she does all of the housework and cooking for the family. She has a crush on a dude at work and becomes completely tongue tied and stupid around him, as if she were a junior high school student instead of pushing 30. In short, she's a total loser. She really is. So what makes her a "shrew"? Well, she's kind of mouthy sometimes. That's it.

Again, I don't really know what the original "shrew" in the play was like, but in this day and age there are about a thousand believable ways to make a woman headstrong. Make her an outspoken liberal in a family of conservatives, or a conservative in a family of liberals (not that I'd read that iteration, but at least the rebellion would have some kind of philosophy behind it). Make her an activist or a burlesque dancer or a guitarist in a rock band! Something. Something besides just faintly sarcastic sometimes. Honestly, I could not stand Kate. Every time she mouthed off to someone I just thought it was really big talk from such a loser. Uncharitable, yes, but how charitable can I really be expected to be toward such a useless character?

Then there's Pyotr, her father's lab assistant, who's about to be deported if someone (you guessed it, Kate) doesn't give him a green-card marriage. Pyotr could not have been more of a caricature. He has a goofy accent that's played for laughs and is constantly using malapropisms. Despite coming from a war-torn country, he has a jolly, expansive "America! What a country!"-style enthusiasm for everything, including Kate. But frankly, he's also kind of a sexist douchebag, and he doesn't always treat Kate very well. He's traditional, old school, and not in a good way. There's really no reason in the world why a contemporary woman would fall for him. Again, this character could have been so much more interesting--why not make him darker? His tumultuous past would certainly support his having a gloomy demeanor that would cause some friction, but that would be totally understandable and that Kate could have eventually broken through, enabling them to develop a deeper relationship. And yes, I believe this could have been done without making the novel significantly heavier--although some heaviness wouldn't have hurt. This book is so light it's about to float away.

Anyway, initially Kate is offended that her father wants her to marry Pyotr in order to keep him in the country. Does her father really think she deserves nothing better in life than to marry some random dude she doesn't love, she wonders? A really good question, one I would also have liked an answer to. But eventually Kate begins to think that moving in with Pyotr (separate bedrooms, of course) would give her a chance to start over, give her life a jolt. Meanwhile, I can think of about a million things that would give Kate's life a jolt that don't involve marrying a stranger. How about getting a different job, one you're actually suited for? How about going back to school? How about moving out of your father's house, either on your own or with a roommate? How about getting some friends? How about getting on OkCupid? How about telling your sister and father to do their own damn laundry? How about just telling your father that instead of cooking the exact same dinner he has expected all of you to eat EVERY NIGHT for YEARS and YEARS, you're going to cook something different? Honestly, the fact that Kate wanted to use Pyotr as a substitute for getting her own life made her seem like even more of a loser to me. Some shrew she turned out to be.

Near the end of the book, Pyotr is genuinely rude to Kate and starts pulling a lot of "I am the man, and you will obey me!" crap with her, and I honestly thought she was going to say hasta la vista to the whole situation. She should have! That would have been an interesting ending and made her much less of a loser. Instead, she pulls a completely bizarre move: At her post-wedding dinner, she stands up and gives a speech about how men are always expected to hide their feelings, which wrecks their lives and relationships, whereas women are the truly free creatures because they are allowed to show their feelings. This was utterly bizarre. I mean, I totally agree that our culture discourages men from showing their feelings and that this is not a good thing. But this doesn't give any individual man the right to act like a patriarchal douchebag, and it certainly doesn't mean Kate, or anyone, is required to marry a patriarchal douchebag. What's more, up to now Kate has given literally zero inkling that she'd been thinking about Pyotr in these terms. It all seems like a last-ditch attempt to explain away Pyotr's less-than-desirable behavior. Pyotr, of course, loves it. And so they lived happily ever after. And I threw the book across the room. (hide spoiler)]

One of my Goodreads friends has already received a comment on her review to the effect that this book should be "enjoyed for what it is!!!!!" So I want to make one thing clear: I understand the concept of light entertainment. I do not expect every book I read to be deeply significant to my life. I do expect, however, that any book I read be free of cartoonish characters, unexamined retro attitudes, and completely implausible situations. Vinegar Girl fails on all of these counts. In an interview, Anne Tyler herself called this book "a meringue," and I can't help but read that to mean "I totally half-assed this!", because it seems like that's what she did. (Either that, or she's just too advanced in years to be writing about today's young people--and I mean that matter-of-factly, not in a pejorative way.) I can only imagine the Hogarth Press people's reaction when she delivered this manuscript. This is nothing like any other Anne Tyler book out there. It's nothing like any other book I can think of. And I mean that in a bad way.

I won this book in a First Reads giveaway here on Goodreads.

---

add:    link cover