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I really didn’t like this book very much, which surprised me, because it was heavily recommended by the author Jonathan Franzen, and usually I love everything he suggests (e.g., THE MAN WHO LOVED CHILDREN). This though I found just mostly lame. It is about an American girl in the 1970s who ends up with a much older Italian man. She is interested in being a conceptual artist, and in motorbikes, and finds herself going to Italy to try and break a land speed record. Somehow she ends up in some social unrest and gets dumped.
While I can see why many critics admired it, I can also see why some panned it. I saw one describe it as “macho,” which I thoroughly agree with. It also has a very common and very annoying figure in contemporary literature, which is the protagonist who kind of drifts around without any agency. There was also a terrible chapter where the author thought she better let us know that the rubber for the motorcycle tires came from oppressed people in the Amazon. Embarrassingly for this section she changes to the second person present tense. In addition to everything else, I very much fear the author thinks indigenous people live in the moment. Cringe.