Title: metonymic overkill
Product review: I suppose there is some dramatic action to this novel -- we do have the obligatory scandal and ensuing suicide. And yet the writing feels static, as if it can't move forward. Perhaps that sense is due to the writer's belabored prose. There's an inappropriate metaphor or simile every other sentence. (I can't believe she uses the adjective metonymic twice. Obviously she spent too much time in graduate school.) And also is due to the long and often repeated authorial lectures on the pains of adolescence, exile, and the hopes of Camus and Augustine for a free Algeria. For her, Algeria is a pretext, a prop, which she gets to use without really doing anything. It's all a bit much in this contrived paint-by-the-numbers literary product that appears to have been written primarily to further a career. At this, Messud, judging by her current bestsellerdom, has apparently succeeded brilliantly.
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