Well of course the premise appealed to me. (From the blurb: Rose McEwan is a struggling writer who keeps having strange encounters with famous people. In this engrossing, original novel-in-stories, we follow her life from age seventeen, when she takes a summer writing course led by a young John Updike; through her first heartbreak, witnessed by Joni Mitchell; through [her] marriage, divorce, and a canoe trip with Taylor Swift, Leonard Cohen and Karl Ove Nausgaard.)
And two parenthetical asides on the first page convinced me I should read it. (First sentence: 'The Doon School of Fine Arts occupied the former summer house of Horatio Walker, a modestly-celebrated (there is no other kind) nineteenth-century Canadian painter.' And start of next paragraph: 'I had just turned seventeen. My parents, eager to encourage my precocious "way with words" and my "flair for art" (I excelled at drawing horses in profile) had signed me up for summer courses - one week of Introductory Oil Painting, followed by a week of Introductory Creative Writing.')
And, well, it's unfailingly fun to meet a new famous person - or two - in each story, and something of a balm, a kindness to the reader, that all are depicted in sympathetic terms which seem consonant with their public personae (even if Bob Dylan does somewhat outstay his welcome at Rose's lakeside holiday cottage). The theme interests me, too, as captured in the author's note that 'Their [the celebrities'] presence in these stories is meant to represent the powerful and intimate roles that famous people sometimes play in our ordinary lives'; as an aside, it amused me to realise that of the smorgasbord who do appear, Taylor Swift is actually the most significant for me, albeit probably only just shading Dylan and Neil Young. And Jackson's prose, especially on a sentence through to scene level, is clean, unobtrusive and occasionally rather lovely.
In the end, though, the novel (or collection of stories) is overwhelmed by the concept. Rose herself is a thin character, emerging as something of a (privileged, white) everywoman but without enough differentiation or strangeness - by which I mean the everyday kind that marks all of us - to convincingly anchor the stories as a whole. And that thinness is characteristic of the story and plotting in general - I didn't get the sense of depths between the lines that really fine fiction produces (exceptions: the first one, with Updike, the last one, with the canoe trip, and to lesser extents the Bill Murray, Charlotte Rampling and Adam Driver ones). So, by no means a bad book, but not a stayer either.
And two parenthetical asides on the first page convinced me I should read it. (First sentence: 'The Doon School of Fine Arts occupied the former summer house of Horatio Walker, a modestly-celebrated (there is no other kind) nineteenth-century Canadian painter.' And start of next paragraph: 'I had just turned seventeen. My parents, eager to encourage my precocious "way with words" and my "flair for art" (I excelled at drawing horses in profile) had signed me up for summer courses - one week of Introductory Oil Painting, followed by a week of Introductory Creative Writing.')
And, well, it's unfailingly fun to meet a new famous person - or two - in each story, and something of a balm, a kindness to the reader, that all are depicted in sympathetic terms which seem consonant with their public personae (even if Bob Dylan does somewhat outstay his welcome at Rose's lakeside holiday cottage). The theme interests me, too, as captured in the author's note that 'Their [the celebrities'] presence in these stories is meant to represent the powerful and intimate roles that famous people sometimes play in our ordinary lives'; as an aside, it amused me to realise that of the smorgasbord who do appear, Taylor Swift is actually the most significant for me, albeit probably only just shading Dylan and Neil Young. And Jackson's prose, especially on a sentence through to scene level, is clean, unobtrusive and occasionally rather lovely.
In the end, though, the novel (or collection of stories) is overwhelmed by the concept. Rose herself is a thin character, emerging as something of a (privileged, white) everywoman but without enough differentiation or strangeness - by which I mean the everyday kind that marks all of us - to convincingly anchor the stories as a whole. And that thinness is characteristic of the story and plotting in general - I didn't get the sense of depths between the lines that really fine fiction produces (exceptions: the first one, with Updike, the last one, with the canoe trip, and to lesser extents the Bill Murray, Charlotte Rampling and Adam Driver ones). So, by no means a bad book, but not a stayer either.
