A review by bellatora
Cloudstreet, by Tim Winton
4.0
This is the most self-consciously literary book I’ve read in a long, long time. At first it was really enjoyable – Winton is truly a talented writer and there were so many sentences that were just spot-on perfect descriptions. That’s amazingly hard to do – find exactly the right word or image. And Winton has that talent.
BUT this is like The Great Gatsby, where Fitzgerald labored over every idea and word to produce a book instead of a novel. Characters are used in the service of the book or theme, rather than to serve themselves. Everyone is fleshed out, but no one seems whole. This is a perfect English class book – but I feel it’s a little...much. By the halfway point I was like, “this story is still going on!?!?? Is the plot ever going to kick in? Are the characters ever going to evolve?” Ummm…nope.
The Lambs and the Pickles are two sides of the same coin. The Lambs are (ex)-religious folk, who believe in family and hardwork. They run a successful corner shop and have a rambunctious family of (mostly) happy children – although Fish became developmentally disabled after drowning and Quick lives the life of the guilt-ridden. The other children are some barely remembered gaggle of girls and a younger brother. The landlords are the Pickles, who are a deeply unhappy, barely functional family that believes in luck and personal pleasure – Sam is a charming gambler (horse races are his drug of choice) who is generous when he is flush, but usually he's lost everything. Dolly is a beautiful alcoholic who uses beer and strange men to make herself feel better. Both parents pretty much neglect their children. The boys are nonentities, but Rose Pickles is a priggish girl who reacts to the chaos of her home with a craving for order. She hates her mother and becomes anorexic just to spite her. Rose Pickles and Quick Lamb are essentially assigned to represent their generation in their respective families, since none of their siblings really have anything besides one-word personality traits (except the brain-damaged Fish, who gets a weird magical-realism place in this book). Rose and Quick are the only two characters that I think actually developed - the parents essentially stay who they were throughout the book, except softened a bit by age and tragedy.
Winton is a beautiful writer, but he needed to end the book a good hundred pages earlier and actually develop his characters instead of using them as props.
BUT this is like The Great Gatsby, where Fitzgerald labored over every idea and word to produce a book instead of a novel. Characters are used in the service of the book or theme, rather than to serve themselves. Everyone is fleshed out, but no one seems whole. This is a perfect English class book – but I feel it’s a little...much. By the halfway point I was like, “this story is still going on!?!?? Is the plot ever going to kick in? Are the characters ever going to evolve?” Ummm…nope.
The Lambs and the Pickles are two sides of the same coin. The Lambs are (ex)-religious folk, who believe in family and hardwork. They run a successful corner shop and have a rambunctious family of (mostly) happy children – although Fish became developmentally disabled after drowning and Quick lives the life of the guilt-ridden. The other children are some barely remembered gaggle of girls and a younger brother. The landlords are the Pickles, who are a deeply unhappy, barely functional family that believes in luck and personal pleasure – Sam is a charming gambler (horse races are his drug of choice) who is generous when he is flush, but usually he's lost everything. Dolly is a beautiful alcoholic who uses beer and strange men to make herself feel better. Both parents pretty much neglect their children. The boys are nonentities, but Rose Pickles is a priggish girl who reacts to the chaos of her home with a craving for order. She hates her mother and becomes anorexic just to spite her. Rose Pickles and Quick Lamb are essentially assigned to represent their generation in their respective families, since none of their siblings really have anything besides one-word personality traits (except the brain-damaged Fish, who gets a weird magical-realism place in this book). Rose and Quick are the only two characters that I think actually developed - the parents essentially stay who they were throughout the book, except softened a bit by age and tragedy.
Winton is a beautiful writer, but he needed to end the book a good hundred pages earlier and actually develop his characters instead of using them as props.