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emilysquest's review against another edition
5.0
I just finished this book, and man, y’all. I really liked it. “Really liked” didn’t always translate to “was riveted by” or even “consistently enjoyed reading,” but I have to say—as a queer woman, as a mystery aficionada, and as someone from a family of addicts, with her own complicated past and present history with substance use/abuse—that I feel tremendously grateful it exists.
Maggie Terry takes the mystery-novel cliché of the hard-drinking police detective or private eye, and tweaks it in ways that leave the reader surprised at how seriously she suddenly must follow through on this familiar premise. Maggie Terry the character spends the entirety of this novel dealing with issues which—not only are they issues most alcoholic detective characters don’t have to face, but they’re two or three steps down the road from the issues those characters don’t have to face. Usually, the detective’s hard drinking is either a more-or-less static reality in their life (Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, Jessica Jones at least in Season 1), or it generates narrative tension due to its degrading influence on the detective’s ability to do their job, in which case the question is more: will they acknowledge the problem and work to get better? (Nate Ford in Season 2 of Leverage, or [I hear] Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect). In Maggie Terry, that whole process of degradation, disaster, confrontation and acknowledgment is already in the past. As the novel opens, Maggie’s girlfriend has left her and taken their daughter; she’s been kicked off the NYPD and put through an inpatient rehab program; she has a sponsor; she goes to NA meetings multiple times a day; she’s 18 months sober—but she definitely hasn’t stopped being an addict, mentally or emotionally. All of that apparatus, the meetings and the sponsor and the starting a new job, that’s what’s saving her life. But it doesn’t bestow upon her a life to be saved. Eighteen months sober doesn’t REMOTELY mean that Maggie is “doing well,” or that she is “not a trainwreck.” She is emphatically still a trainwreck, from start to finish. It’s just that now she’s a sober one.
And that continuing trainwreck quality is something I sincerely prized about this book. So many depictions of addiction flinch from the grinding tedium and constant rawness of recovery. Much like romance plots, the focus is on will-they-or-won’t-they: will they kiss? will they pick up that bottle? It’s a tragedy if they take that drink, or a happy, life-affirming ending if they don’t. While Maggie is still tempted on a near-nightly basis to go back to using, the focus of Schulman’s book is less on whether she’ll lapse, and more on the other parts of recovery: a “recovery” that’s really more like building from scratch a life and a personality that never fully developed in the first place. Spending a couple of decades making substance use the center of one’s priorities means that the rest of one’s development—the evolution of a personality, the cultivation of interests outside oneself, the ability to empathize with other people and sometimes put others ahead of one’s own interests—gets put on hold. Maggie spends the majority of this book trying (and often failing) to come to grips with who and what the “she” is who she’s supposed to be rehabilitating and recovering. She is 42 years old, but she has the self-involved crisis of personality, and the awkward inability to interact with other people, of a teenager.
As a reader, that self-involved quality is sometimes tedious and frustrating to read. Maggie’s self-pity and her lack of self-knowledge are often rough going. But they ring EXTREMELY true. And Schulman also does a great job of illustrating why they ring true: because what else is Maggie going to focus on? What else does she have? Without drugs, her life and her concept of self don’t just feel empty: they genuinely are empty. Her family of origin is toxic and also alcoholic; her previous professional connections are severed due to her disease; her ex-girlfriend and daughter are out of bounds to her; but more than any of this, the organizing principle of her life and her self-concept has been removed, and she has nothing to replace it with. She’s starting to rebuild from the very bottom, and it’s an exhaustingly destabilized and tedious process. I don’t think I’ve ever read something that confronts that reality in quite the way Schulman does here.
(As a side note: I also really appreciated the depiction of navigating AA/NA as an atheist. Maggie doesn’t believe in a higher power, which makes the 12-step program a rough fit for her; this is something with which I have intimate family experience, and Schulman’s depictions rang very true.)
In any case: not a light read, but a very good one.
Maggie Terry takes the mystery-novel cliché of the hard-drinking police detective or private eye, and tweaks it in ways that leave the reader surprised at how seriously she suddenly must follow through on this familiar premise. Maggie Terry the character spends the entirety of this novel dealing with issues which—not only are they issues most alcoholic detective characters don’t have to face, but they’re two or three steps down the road from the issues those characters don’t have to face. Usually, the detective’s hard drinking is either a more-or-less static reality in their life (Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, Jessica Jones at least in Season 1), or it generates narrative tension due to its degrading influence on the detective’s ability to do their job, in which case the question is more: will they acknowledge the problem and work to get better? (Nate Ford in Season 2 of Leverage, or [I hear] Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect). In Maggie Terry, that whole process of degradation, disaster, confrontation and acknowledgment is already in the past. As the novel opens, Maggie’s girlfriend has left her and taken their daughter; she’s been kicked off the NYPD and put through an inpatient rehab program; she has a sponsor; she goes to NA meetings multiple times a day; she’s 18 months sober—but she definitely hasn’t stopped being an addict, mentally or emotionally. All of that apparatus, the meetings and the sponsor and the starting a new job, that’s what’s saving her life. But it doesn’t bestow upon her a life to be saved. Eighteen months sober doesn’t REMOTELY mean that Maggie is “doing well,” or that she is “not a trainwreck.” She is emphatically still a trainwreck, from start to finish. It’s just that now she’s a sober one.
And that continuing trainwreck quality is something I sincerely prized about this book. So many depictions of addiction flinch from the grinding tedium and constant rawness of recovery. Much like romance plots, the focus is on will-they-or-won’t-they: will they kiss? will they pick up that bottle? It’s a tragedy if they take that drink, or a happy, life-affirming ending if they don’t. While Maggie is still tempted on a near-nightly basis to go back to using, the focus of Schulman’s book is less on whether she’ll lapse, and more on the other parts of recovery: a “recovery” that’s really more like building from scratch a life and a personality that never fully developed in the first place. Spending a couple of decades making substance use the center of one’s priorities means that the rest of one’s development—the evolution of a personality, the cultivation of interests outside oneself, the ability to empathize with other people and sometimes put others ahead of one’s own interests—gets put on hold. Maggie spends the majority of this book trying (and often failing) to come to grips with who and what the “she” is who she’s supposed to be rehabilitating and recovering. She is 42 years old, but she has the self-involved crisis of personality, and the awkward inability to interact with other people, of a teenager.
As a reader, that self-involved quality is sometimes tedious and frustrating to read. Maggie’s self-pity and her lack of self-knowledge are often rough going. But they ring EXTREMELY true. And Schulman also does a great job of illustrating why they ring true: because what else is Maggie going to focus on? What else does she have? Without drugs, her life and her concept of self don’t just feel empty: they genuinely are empty. Her family of origin is toxic and also alcoholic; her previous professional connections are severed due to her disease; her ex-girlfriend and daughter are out of bounds to her; but more than any of this, the organizing principle of her life and her self-concept has been removed, and she has nothing to replace it with. She’s starting to rebuild from the very bottom, and it’s an exhaustingly destabilized and tedious process. I don’t think I’ve ever read something that confronts that reality in quite the way Schulman does here.
(As a side note: I also really appreciated the depiction of navigating AA/NA as an atheist. Maggie doesn’t believe in a higher power, which makes the 12-step program a rough fit for her; this is something with which I have intimate family experience, and Schulman’s depictions rang very true.)
In any case: not a light read, but a very good one.
carol26388's review
Hey, a new category of fiction for me: the NFM. Not quite a DNF, it's a Not For Me, a quit before I waste any more time. I just can't like it. About a third into it I realized that it is essentially a character study of an addict, Maggie, and at page 50, I'm not even sure how complex she is. It could be that being an addict eventually eats up a lot of what personality a person has. It could also be that Schulman is first a non-fiction writer, and may have been using this book as her own personal Message Board, and as such has points to make beyond the average mystery novel.
I'm not the only one to note this. I'd have to agree with the reviewer who says, "Her Maggie Terry is 50% Maggie's journey, 25% political commentary about the US and the present state of New York in particular and 25% crime resolution." I'm at least 25% in, and quite possibly 30%, and only now has Maggie--and the reader--been introduced to the idea that there's a case. As this point there's been a lot of discussion about Maggie's addicted life; the lost of her non-biological daughter to her wife, the biological mother; and days on the NYPD.
I was tempted into this by a friend's review, the backstory that Maggie is a lesbian--not your average mystery hero, by any means--and by a blurb from Sara Gran, writer of one of my favorite books, as well as further comparisons to Gran. But no, not so much. It lacks the humor, pacing, and subtlety of Clare DeWitt. I'd highly suggest you try out Gran's books over this one.
Writing sample (it's not spoiler, it's just three paragraphs):
"By midmorning she was already itchy. By quarter to twelve, concentration had become impossible. Two hours of staring at the Fitzgerald & Robbins employee handbook's list of procedures, interspersed with Mike's witty catchphrases, produced no new understanding of her fate. Revelation was all she was looking for, apparently, and the other daily requirements of being normal and functional sat in the way of her transformation into a person happy enough not to be a burden to others. But rules were rules, so Maggie hoped she could pic up what she needed to know on the job. Winging it was both her secret strength and fatal flaw.
By the time church bells announced noon's arrival, she strategically waited two full minutes and then rand down the stairs and hurried the three blocks to the local YMCA. Rachel had made a map of all the 12 Step meetings in a ten-block radius, which was probably a violation of Rachel's Al-Anon requirement: Don't Be a Doormat; Don't Be a Nag. But Maggie was grateful. She never would have made it through the day without support, and she never would have been able to think clearly enough to have figured out a list in advance of the moment of truth. Need was always a crisis and crisis always a surprise. There were a lot of meetings in Chelsea, the West village, and Midtown; debtors, meth heads, gamblers, purgers, people who were not loved and therefore loved others to a degree that someone deemed "too much." Maggie's lunch break was spent eating her nails at an NA meeting in the Y's gray-carpeted rear room. Despite qualifying for many branches of Program, she new what itchy meant. It meant she was an addict and had to get her sorry ass to NA.
It didn't take long, feeling ill as ease in her normally familiar folding chair, to realize that this meeting was the first time she'd entered the Rooms as an employed person. The difference was immediately obvious. her uncomfortable work clothes made her standard fallback, slouching, impossible. No longer able to huddle against the force of her own self-created misfortune, she had to sit upright, legs crossed at the ankles. fear of wrinkles, and even more stains, dictated her posture. the made it harder for Maggie to feel. Fear usually did that job. Refusing to collapse took a resolve that interfered with pain, making it secondary to the effort of sitting up. Was there still only room for one thing at a time in her broken-down machine of a body? either pain or maintenance? Pain or posture? This was not the goal. The goal was integration, to have it all--pain, posture, clean shirts, nuanced thoughts, clarity. Alina within arm's reach. A self, a self. She had none of that, but today, for the first time since she had been stripped of her badge in disgrace, she had a job. Gratitude!" (p. 28).
That's what a great deal of the book is like, a strange mix of the narrative voice with Maggie's, and a very exhausting one at that. I wavered on rating, and whether or not to do so. As I shared the quote, I realized my disinterest is also about subject and narrative choice. The writing itself is occasionally excellent, and the characters were all-too-human. Unfortunately, much of it is very rooted in a particular time period, particularly Trump's presidency, and a NYC that is experiencing the same cultural shifting as the rest of the country.
Had it been differently written, I might have stayed with it long enough to finish. After all, Matt Scudder spent time in "the Program" in his mysteries, but I read the entire series, so it isn't just the addiction angle. I think, for me, this was really more literary fiction about one woman's search for personal growth with a tiny bit of a mystery, rooted at a particular place in time. It's well done, but not for me.
I'm not the only one to note this. I'd have to agree with the reviewer who says, "Her Maggie Terry is 50% Maggie's journey, 25% political commentary about the US and the present state of New York in particular and 25% crime resolution." I'm at least 25% in, and quite possibly 30%, and only now has Maggie--and the reader--been introduced to the idea that there's a case. As this point there's been a lot of discussion about Maggie's addicted life; the lost of her non-biological daughter to her wife, the biological mother; and days on the NYPD.
I was tempted into this by a friend's review, the backstory that Maggie is a lesbian--not your average mystery hero, by any means--and by a blurb from Sara Gran, writer of one of my favorite books, as well as further comparisons to Gran. But no, not so much. It lacks the humor, pacing, and subtlety of Clare DeWitt. I'd highly suggest you try out Gran's books over this one.
Writing sample (it's not spoiler, it's just three paragraphs):
"By midmorning she was already itchy. By quarter to twelve, concentration had become impossible. Two hours of staring at the Fitzgerald & Robbins employee handbook's list of procedures, interspersed with Mike's witty catchphrases, produced no new understanding of her fate. Revelation was all she was looking for, apparently, and the other daily requirements of being normal and functional sat in the way of her transformation into a person happy enough not to be a burden to others. But rules were rules, so Maggie hoped she could pic up what she needed to know on the job. Winging it was both her secret strength and fatal flaw.
By the time church bells announced noon's arrival, she strategically waited two full minutes and then rand down the stairs and hurried the three blocks to the local YMCA. Rachel had made a map of all the 12 Step meetings in a ten-block radius, which was probably a violation of Rachel's Al-Anon requirement: Don't Be a Doormat; Don't Be a Nag. But Maggie was grateful. She never would have made it through the day without support, and she never would have been able to think clearly enough to have figured out a list in advance of the moment of truth. Need was always a crisis and crisis always a surprise. There were a lot of meetings in Chelsea, the West village, and Midtown; debtors, meth heads, gamblers, purgers, people who were not loved and therefore loved others to a degree that someone deemed "too much." Maggie's lunch break was spent eating her nails at an NA meeting in the Y's gray-carpeted rear room. Despite qualifying for many branches of Program, she new what itchy meant. It meant she was an addict and had to get her sorry ass to NA.
It didn't take long, feeling ill as ease in her normally familiar folding chair, to realize that this meeting was the first time she'd entered the Rooms as an employed person. The difference was immediately obvious. her uncomfortable work clothes made her standard fallback, slouching, impossible. No longer able to huddle against the force of her own self-created misfortune, she had to sit upright, legs crossed at the ankles. fear of wrinkles, and even more stains, dictated her posture. the made it harder for Maggie to feel. Fear usually did that job. Refusing to collapse took a resolve that interfered with pain, making it secondary to the effort of sitting up. Was there still only room for one thing at a time in her broken-down machine of a body? either pain or maintenance? Pain or posture? This was not the goal. The goal was integration, to have it all--pain, posture, clean shirts, nuanced thoughts, clarity. Alina within arm's reach. A self, a self. She had none of that, but today, for the first time since she had been stripped of her badge in disgrace, she had a job. Gratitude!" (p. 28).
That's what a great deal of the book is like, a strange mix of the narrative voice with Maggie's, and a very exhausting one at that. I wavered on rating, and whether or not to do so. As I shared the quote, I realized my disinterest is also about subject and narrative choice. The writing itself is occasionally excellent, and the characters were all-too-human. Unfortunately, much of it is very rooted in a particular time period, particularly Trump's presidency, and a NYC that is experiencing the same cultural shifting as the rest of the country.
Had it been differently written, I might have stayed with it long enough to finish. After all, Matt Scudder spent time in "the Program" in his mysteries, but I read the entire series, so it isn't just the addiction angle. I think, for me, this was really more literary fiction about one woman's search for personal growth with a tiny bit of a mystery, rooted at a particular place in time. It's well done, but not for me.
vchvk's review
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
0.5
synth's review
1.0
The one thing I appreciated in this book was that the author never needed to have the main character show attraction/objectification of women to mark her queerness. But the characters are one-dimensional, the main character unlikable for her blandness trying to hide under a Tragic PastTM and some white liberal views of american society. The writing is not awful on a technical level, it errs a little with head-hopping at times but it's pretty decent if a bit dry or rambly otherwise.
knitterscasket's review
5.0
I love Sarah Schulman so much I forgot I pre-ordered this book and ordered it a second time. Worth it though. My only complaint is that it was too short and I finished reading it too fast.
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