Scan barcode
A review by marthagal
You or Someone Like You by Chandler Burr
4.0
I chose YOU OR SOMEONE LIKE YOU because it sounded perfect for me, given my nerdiness with books and love of crappy reality TV. In this novel, Anne, the narrator, is married to Howard Rosenbaum, a famous producer in Hollywood. Both Anne and Howard have doctorates in literature, and one of Howard's colleagues asks Anne to come up with a reading list for her. Within weeks, Anne is holding book groups for half of Hollywood and starts unintentionally playing an important role in which projects get made and which ones get shelved.
About a hundred pages into this book, I thought it was going to be a cliche plot - the story about the Hollywood starter wife being traded in for a younger model. Or the story about the wife who has always been in the background, supporting her husband, and then her career takes off the husband gets jealous and steps out on her in order to feel important again. Etcetera. Still, I found the book enjoyable in spite of these perceived cliches because of all the literature that's interspersed and woven into the plot. Anne uses novels and poetry to tell her reading groups - as well as the reader - about her life, about how she sees the outside world.
Then I felt the novel suddenly became a totally different book about religion and God and Judaism and the Holocaust. Though I guess it's not completely fair of me to say that it became a different book - the groundwork for Howard's religious crisis was laid early on. I just never saw it coming, much like Anne.
I found the second part of the book completely fascinating. I had never thought about the rules of Judaism, how the religion demands that the world be separated into Jewish and Gentile - as something racist and wrong. That the outrage over the Nazis singling out the Jews to die in the Holocaust was hypocritical, as it was just the inverse of what Jews have always done by singling themselves out. I found this idea pretty unsettling, actually, and I'm still am not sure what I think about it.
There's a lot in the book. Fun details about how Hollywood works. Name dropping of celebrities (J.J. Abrams attends the book group.). Literature and how it can illuminate life. Religion. Homosexuality. The meaning of life.
I really enjoyed this and would recommend it.
About a hundred pages into this book, I thought it was going to be a cliche plot - the story about the Hollywood starter wife being traded in for a younger model. Or the story about the wife who has always been in the background, supporting her husband, and then her career takes off the husband gets jealous and steps out on her in order to feel important again. Etcetera. Still, I found the book enjoyable in spite of these perceived cliches because of all the literature that's interspersed and woven into the plot. Anne uses novels and poetry to tell her reading groups - as well as the reader - about her life, about how she sees the outside world.
Then I felt the novel suddenly became a totally different book about religion and God and Judaism and the Holocaust. Though I guess it's not completely fair of me to say that it became a different book - the groundwork for Howard's religious crisis was laid early on. I just never saw it coming, much like Anne.
I found the second part of the book completely fascinating. I had never thought about the rules of Judaism, how the religion demands that the world be separated into Jewish and Gentile - as something racist and wrong. That the outrage over the Nazis singling out the Jews to die in the Holocaust was hypocritical, as it was just the inverse of what Jews have always done by singling themselves out. I found this idea pretty unsettling, actually, and I'm still am not sure what I think about it.
There's a lot in the book. Fun details about how Hollywood works. Name dropping of celebrities (J.J. Abrams attends the book group.). Literature and how it can illuminate life. Religion. Homosexuality. The meaning of life.
I really enjoyed this and would recommend it.