The Likeness by Tana French

The Likeness by Tana French

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Well.

Follows In the Woods. Cassie walks out of the wreckage and into a new case which sends her undercover to infiltrate the tight-knit household of a murdered girl. This is very much like In the Woods, and I'm not talking about the need to suspend one's disbelief on the premise. Both of these books are post facto first person memoirs of travail and inevitable destruction; they both examine the forging and breaking of human connections; they are both intricately written and occasionally overwritten, with a core of twisty psychological intensity.

This one didn't work on me as well as In the Woods. Partly because all the thematic underpinnings here on the creation of group identities and the struggle for happiness in the modern world just didn't interest me as much. And partly because I'm onto French now, and I was never all that impressed with her more gothic flourishings. I sighed tiredly when this book did an actual "When I dream of Whitethorne House…." Sequence.

But. All that said. There is so much to unpick from French's convolutions and turnings. And every few pages something would flash out at me, aimed just right. "I wanted to tell her that being loved is a talent too, that it takes as much guts and as much work as loving; that some people, for whatever reason, never learn the knack." Oh, Cassie, I know who you are thinking of.

At the bottom of it all, French is a tremendous craftsman, and my dissatisfaction with this book comes from my conviction that it retreads too much stylistic ground, that she has something more daring and different in her, and that I want it.




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The Tell Tale Brain

The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human by V.S. Ramachandran

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


I've never read Ramachandran in long form before, and I don't think I ever will again. This stuff is right up my tree – popular neurology – but . . . no. I started having a sinking feeling at "Over the years I have worked with hundreds of patients afflicted, though some feel they are blessed, with a great diversity of unusual and curious neurological disorders." Oh really said my eyebrows, because that could either be a careless turn of phrase, or a blunt dismissal of the social model of disability and the understanding of disability as anything other than a curse. I forged on with an open mind.

Spoilers: it was the second one.

A few of the lowlights: a lot of clinically accurate yet deeply disturbing discussion of autism in which Ramachandran all but questions the place of autistic people in the human race; repeated descriptions of how brave it is for patients to try to remain happy despite their afflictions (I mean, can you imagine actually being happy with a disability!); an endorsement of Cure Autism Now, which I will put in the correct disability politics context by explaining that my hiss and recoil was exactly the same you'd make if you were a lifelong liberal who discovered the person advising you on political facts was an ardent Tea Partier.

So yeah. Really wish I hadn't given him any money.




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