Detailed plot synopsis reviews of What Alice Forgot |
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But Alice, now remembering what it was like when she was in love with Nick, decides she wants to stay married to him. She told Dominick she no longer needed his p_nis and to park it in some other woman's v_gina, and Dominick was such a pussy that he just accepted it meekly like his balls had been chopped off.
Alice and Nick get back together. All problems between them are solved, without explanation.
The end.
Literary Criticism:
This book wasn't merely ordinary level bad--it was award-winning bad. When I started reading this story, I groaned when I quickly discovered it was going to be another cock-tease story where we get a conclusion at first, and then we are forced to wade through 500 pages to figure out how we got that conclusion. That's an artificial way of creating dramatic tension. The better way to create dramatic tension is to have compelling characters and have interesting things happen to them. Simply saying, "Here's what happened in the story. You will have to read 500 pages to find out why" is lazy writing, especially when most of the exposition of the story is: "Alice asks why she is divorcing Nick. She gets an ambiguous answer for the 20th time."
Click here to see the rest of this reviewThe rest of the story, when Alice isn't getting ambiguous answers, isn't much better. The first time I started reading those long letters Elizabeth wrote to her psychiatrist I was wondering what place did this have in the story? And then I realized: it was filler. Even the author couldn't have 500 pages of Alice simply asking, over and over again, why she was divorcing her husband, without a break. So Elizabeth's wholly unrelated trauma is inserted into the story, and it is tedious as well, but in a different way.
When the mystery of Alice's alienation from Nick is revealed, it's totally disappointing. It turns out there is no mystery at all. It was as it appeared--Nick wasn't at home much and didn't give Alice enough attention and affection. Why did we have to plow through 500 pages of amnesia to find that out, when we knew it from the beginning?
And Gina is hyped up to be an important figure. She's not. She's just a dead friend.
And finally, Alice decides to stay with Nick at the end, but the author doesn't show us if Nick changes his behavior to suit Alice. It just seems to be accepted that things will work out between the two of them, without any explanation.
I would call this lazy writing except it must have taken the author time to write 500 pages of this. Perhaps it would be more accurate to call it untalented writing.
