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Saturday, October 27, 2007
The Guy Not Taken by Jennifer Weiner
I keep picking up Jennifer Weiner’s books because even while they have yet to captivate me in the same way that Jane Green’s novels do, I still think they’re good books. I picked up The Guy Not Taken before my trip to see Johnathan in August. It stayed in my luggage, untouched because I napped rather than spending much time at reading.
The first thing that struck me while reading this series of short stories is that divorce is a heavily used theme, as is parental abandonment. I think in almost every story, some form of one or both themes manifests itself. I was comforted to see Weiner make comments about this very same thing in an interview that was printed in the back. Apparently most of these stories were concocted during her early college years, which occurred just after her own father left the family.
I think, inexplicably, my favorite series of short stories were those which were the most clearly autobiographical – those of Josie, Nicki, Jon and their mother. Even while Nicki was whiny and sour, Jon was sullen and Josie seemed to have very little backbone of her own, always afraid of making a wrong step, I found the family endearing. Throughout the whole thing, it’s clear they care about each other, to some degree. They also seem to be very bad at showing it. I really liked reading the trilogy of short stories about them that were interspersed throughout.
My least favorite had to be the story of Dora getting robbed in a manner of speaking by Amber and Dawn, two girls from New Jersey. None of the characters jumped out at me as characters with whom I could identify or at least find endearing features. It seemed a poor ending to a series of short stories that did keep me reading. I think the novel would have best ended with the last of the three autobiographical stories, which seemed to have the most realistic and final of the endings.
On the whole, it was a nice novel. Not a great one, but a series of short stories cannot be expected to compete with a longer, more cohesive novel. Still, it was a nice read. I look forward to the time when I have the money to pick up Little Earthquakes, which I believe is the last of her novels that I have not yet read.
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