I’d like to think I am pretty good at sorting out strategies to feel less sad on days when I am feeling sad. But sometimes my strategies bomb, and you are now reading a review of one of those times. I was feeling glum this one day, and I decided that to cheer myself up I was going to read a new book, and I picked The Descendants. Jeanne had said it was really good, and I knew vaguely from two-thirds-forgotten movie trailers that it was about a not-super-close family going on like — a road trip? Maybe? And it brings them closer together? Sounds heartwarming, I thought.
If you are not currently facepalming, it’s probably because you — like Past Jenny! — are not aware of the precipitating event that sets this whole plot in motion. Yes, it’s about a father becoming closer to his daughters. Yes, they go traveling together. But the reason this all happens is that the mother in the family (who was the one doing most of the parenting) was thrown from a boat and seriously injured, and now they are preparing to take her off life support, and the family is going on a trip to notify her ex-lover (a person of whose existence the protagonist has only just learned) of her impending death. So um. Turns out it is not the best book to read when you are already feeling sad.
That said, it’s a very good book about being sad. It’s a good book about making the best of a shitty situation. I loved the book’s refusal to veer into melodrama after setting up what on the surface seems to be a fairly melodramatic premise. Matt King is a muddle of a father, and he’s just found out that he’s been kind of a muddle of a husband as well; but he is doing his best to be a good person. And the writing was lovely and trenchant:
The tropics make it difficult to mope. I bet in big cities you can walk down the street scowling and no one will ask you what’s wrong or encourage you to smile, but everyone here has the attitude that we’re lucky to live in Hawaii; paradise reigns supreme. I think paradise can go fuck itself.
Matt King in the midst of a conversation with his teenager daughter Alex:
She’s silent, thinking it over. She stands up and holds out her hand to help me up. I realize I’m fascinated with her. She’s a person I want to know.
That bit made me get teary — again, because I was having an emotional day. But still, it was a very lovely passage. We don’t choose our parents, and most people don’t choose their children either; and I love this depiction of a father thinking that his daughter is someone he would — given the option — choose anyway.
All in all, my recommendation is do read this book. Read it on a day when you are feeling chipper as a sparrow, though, because otherwise if you are like me then you will end up dragging around the house sniffling and feeling sorry for yourself, and you won’t be able to have a glass of wine because you have a rule that you never drink when you’re sad because that’s a slippery slope for an Irish-descended girl with a family history of alcoholism, and you’ll mopily watch two episodes of Scrubs and go to bed at eight-thirty, wishing that you’d gone with your first instinct and read the new Courtney Milan book instead of this.
They also read it: Beth Fish Reads, A Guy’s Moleskine Notebook, and of course Necromancy Never Pays. (Yours?)