Life hasn't always been perfect, but for Abe and Cassandra Green, an afternoon on the San Francisco Bay might be as good as it gets. He's a doctor piloting his new sailing boat. She's a sculptor finally getting a bit of recognition. Their beautiful daughter Elizabeth is off to Harvard at the end of the summer. But then there is a terrible row. Cassandra has been unfaithful. In a fit of insanity, Abe throws himself off the boat.
A love story that begins with the end of a marriage, The Violet Hour follows a 21st century American family through past and present, from a lavish New York wedding to the family funeral home in suburban Washington, from a drunken PTA party to a scene of unexpected public violence.
In this resonant odyssey of youth, middle age, ambition and loss, intimacy is fragile and the search for gratification breeds destruction. Here is a family ripped apart by individual desires. And here is a family possibly reborn.
Comment: Ah, one more TBR challenge post and for September the theme is "drama". Certainly this means quite a broad range of possibilities and I've picked something that, considering the genre, would fit quite well, but I was not happy with the experience.
In this drama story we meet the Green family while they are sailing and apparently at ease but a few comments finally make Abe, the husband, say out loud he knows his wife Cassandra is cheating and he spontaneously dives and swims to the shore. Cassandra and their daughter Elizabeth sail back, but the day is not salvageable, much less the marriage. As the years go by and Cassandra and Abe follow different roads, Elizabeth has learned to deal with this but then, suddenly, Cassandra's father dies and Abe comes back, to pay his respect. Is there any chance they can, at least, agree on talking again?
Last month I had also read a book about a woman who cheated on her husband and, among other issues, that made me dislike the story immensely. Therefore, I wasn't impressed, at all, with Cassandra and her choice and even less with the reasons she had to behave this way. This means the story was not appealing to me and if not for the prologue and Cassandra's father - the short amount of time we had with him alive in the story - this would have an even lower grade, just like I gave the other book.
The prologue was quite interesting, the writing and the vibe made me think the plot would revolve around making amends or if the main characters really were separating, how their lives would evolve... I'd have liked to read that story, but it wasn't so. I thought to myself that the author must have written the prologue in an inspired moment and only later on decided to write the rest and her muse might have been gone. Most of the book is written in such a boring way and has such uninteresting situations that I struggled to keep going.
I could have stopped, of course, but I had this book chosen for this theme since the beginning of the year and didn't want to change the plans I had for the titles chosen for this month anyway. Still, I hoped the story would have been much better than what it was and I still can't quite describe what this was supposed to be about, since the characters didn't do much. I didn't sympathize with any character except, perhaps, Cassandra's father, but his death propelled the majority of the situations and those were vague enough to not matter much in the end, after all.
I can't understand, really, what is the point of writing about people who are not satisfied with life or who make decisions because they are bored or unhappy and why would the reader care about them. If the goal here was to make Cassandra realize the repercussions of her decisions or that they had been, mostly, wrong, perhaps there would be interesting study of human nature, but it felt as if Cassandra was one of those free spirit types of people who would never settle for anything but what they would see as a slice of life, not caring others are affected by that. Frankly, I disliked her and could not see her being redeemed in any way.
This, along with the several characters who don't seem to have any special importance for this story except to prove infidelity and promiscuity is easy, means the story doesn't get any obvious development. Why this story and why this way, I kept thinking. Surely the author had a goal with this and if the idea was to expose the bad side of people, in a general notion, then it would not be necessary to use so many pages. Since the prologue, which I liked how was written, to the end, the plot is more a reunion of episodes with several passages where we see the characters in the past doing things that might somehow justify the current behavior/dialogue, there isn't much to it. I really expected more out of this book when I read the blurb.
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