Summer Book Reviews: by DeeDee El-Hage
In the summer I was supposed to work a full-time job that I had secured since April, but that job fell through. Rather than finding another job, I decided to be a stay-at-home daughter. Over the span of my four months of summer, I read five books, and I’m here to review three of them for you now. (Warning: spoilers ahead!)
Disclaimer: these reviews are my personal opinions, and readers are allowed to respectfully disagree!
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
One of my closest friends lent me their copy of Wilde’s popular classic, but it was my least favourite novel I read all summer. I wasn’t a fan of Wilde’s diction and found it hard to digest. I felt that in the first half of the novel, there is too much exposition and not enough scene. And then in the second half of the novel, the opposite is true. I also dislike that readers get a drag of a chapter that subtly refers to all the awful things Dorian does throughout his life, rather than immersing us in actual scenes where we are shown instead of told. If we were shown more specific scenes, the themes of youth, beauty, destroying the soul and sin would’ve been clearer.
Once Dorian kills Basil, however, it felt like the novel finally grasped my attention and began to pick up—and this happens less than 100 pages from the end of the copy I acquired. The writing style in the last quarter of the novel is so different from the rest that it’s hard to believe it’s still written by Wilde. It felt so rushed—when it once felt so dragged out. The scene where Dorian faints then regains consciousness happens in about three sentences, whereas, if it happened in the first half of the novel, it might’ve dragged on for an entire page. There seems to be no middle ground—only too dragged or too rushed.
I did enjoy how the novel ends because it contains the perfect amount of ambiguity for my liking. We know what happens to Dorian, but we’re left—or at least I was left—asking, “What will everyone else do now?” Will they inquire about how Dorian suddenly aged? Or why the painting seemed so beautiful again? Or how the painting was able to age for Dorian himself? And where could they get one of their own?
Overall, I really enjoyed the premise of the novel—but not its execution. There lives an uncensored version of the novel where Dorian and Basil as queer lovers is canon, but in the copy I had, I was left reading between the homoerotic lines and undertones. There’s also an adaptation of the novel currently in the works, but rumour has it Dorian and Basil will be brothers!
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
(Trigger warning: mentions of sexual abuse, human trafficking, self-harm and suicide)
A Little Life is officially the longest novel I’ve ever read at 914 pages. I was influenced to read A Little Life after seeing it on BookTok several times, and I have no regrets. I’ve noticed that the general response to this novel is either very negative or very positive, and I understand both points of view. The novel deals with heavy material and a lot of people on TikTok say that it feels like ‘trauma porn’—an unnecessary amount of bad things happening for no reason.
The story follows a group of four boys—Jude, Willem, Malcolm and JB—starting when they meet in college in New York City, and then through life together. The protagonist, Jude, has unspeakable childhood sexual trauma from when he lived in a monastery and was kidnapped and trafficked by Brother Luke. He suffers from a disability resulting from a disease he contracted from one of the many men who sexually abused him in his early teen years. The disability eventually leads to the amputation of his legs in his late 40s. Throughout Jude’s life he experiences severe trauma and depression because of his childhood, never gaining an ounce of confidence. He is never able to shake the feeling that what happened to him is his fault, and after a couple of failed suicide attempts, he ultimately takes his life by injecting an artery with air, giving himself a stroke. This comes after Jude and Willem start dating almost 20 years into their friendship. Willem, Malcolm and Malcolm’s wife, Sophie, are all killed in a car accident, which is the beginning of the end for Jude.
The novel didn’t feel like ‘trauma porn’ to me, despite nothing good ever really happening to Jude. I was reminded that just because this isn’t my life it doesn’t mean it isn’t someone else’s. Although the characters and the plot are fictitious, they are very real, in a sense, because boys like Jude exist all over the world. There’s an endless number of men who, when they were boys, suffered sexual abuse and trauma they never recovered from for a multitude of reasons—and their stories deserve to be told.
Yanagihara uses straightforward language that makes her lengthy novel very easy to understand. She doesn’t try to romanticize the events of the novel in any way by using ‘artsy’ language. Rather, she states what is happening bluntly, but with a perfect amount of detail.
When Jude was a baby, he was abandoned by his parents which is how he ends up in the monastery, but in his 30s he is adopted by one of his former professors, Harold Stein. The story is told through third person omniscient perspective, but three separate times we get a letter written by Harold in first person. The first time Harold writes a letter is about 200 pages into the novel and was the first (of many) tears I shed while reading. Harold talks about the trials and tribulations of parenthood, how his biological son Jacob died as a boy and how for years he was terrified for his son’s safety, but when he passed, he finally felt he had nothing to fear anymore. The novel also ends with a letter from Harold addressed to a now-deceased Willem. Through the letter we learn that Jude takes his life, and the delivery via Harold’s letter was, in my opinion, a masterful decision on Yanagihara’s part.
The novel covers deep themes of friendship and chosen family. The characters and their personalities are written with such care and devotion that, for a few days after finishing the novel, I had to remind myself that the characters weren’t real. The novel’s only flaw is that it seems at times a little too immersed in the lives of the characters, and fails to mention important world events happening around them. I wondered to myself, since the novel spans over more than 40 years of these characters’ lives, what are the odds one of those years is 2001? And why isn’t there any mention of 9/11 if they’re living in New York City? After some research, I learned that Yanagihara wanted the novel to remain timeless and ambiguous, which is why a precise timeline can’t be set. It would’ve been nice for some context of what’s happening in the world around the boys, but it’s not a detail that puts me off too much. The content, length and writing style are understandably not for everyone, but they certainly were for me. I absolutely loved this novel and it will remain with me for a very long time.
Pageboy by Elliot Page
In August I binged all four seasons of The Umbrella Academy. I knew Elliot Page was in it and I’d already seen and loved everything he’d been in, so I decided to watch the show, which made me love him even more and want to read his book.
Before purchasing I read some reviews, and someone said they didn’t enjoy the lack of introspection Page provides about his life experiences. But I thought to myself, when I write about my own experiences, I tend not to provide introspection as well, so I thought it wouldn’t bother me, and I was right, and so was the person who wrote that review.
Page tells several stories of his childhood in Halifax, and what it was like being a young queer actor in Hollywood. He tells stories of discovering his gender identity along with the positive and negative aftermaths, but he doesn’t overstep emotional boundaries. There’s not much talk about his feelings, how he felt then and how he feels now. We get a story, then we move on to the next, and I quite enjoyed this.
I found that Page’s writing style was similar to Yanagihara’s and similar to my own. He doesn’t try too hard to sound like a literary genius and instead relies on how astounding simplicity can be.
Pageboy is just over 300 pages and I read it in three days, making it the quickest I’ve read a book since Diary of a Wimpy Kid in the fifth grade. It felt as though I was on FaceTime with Page, having a conversation, or that he was telling me these life stories over coffee and lunch. Although he touches upon homophobia and transphobia as well, the fact that he doesn’t linger on any topic long enough for it to be too sad helped me move from subject to subject in a way that flowed well and made sense with the fast-paced nature of the book. I often told my sister that it felt like I was reading my own journal because that’s how similar our writing styles seemed.
Page’s memoir is an easy read and provides a surprising amount of important Canadian history that I’d never learned about prior to reading (like the Halifax ship explosion in 1917). It also sheds an important light on queer and trans actors as their voices are often silenced—as Page’s was for years. I sincerely enjoyed this from cover to cover.
Plus Page casually mentions that while filming Juno he smoked a joint with his co-star, Michael Cera, and Jonah Hill—who was visiting the set since he and Cera had just wrapped Superbad. I don’t think Page realizes how many of us are insanely jealous that he got high with Michael Cera and Jonah Hill circa 2007.
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