Book Review - Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger

Synopsis: When Elspeth Noblin dies of cancer, she leaves her London apartment to her twin nieces, Julia and Valentina. These two American girls never met their English aunt, only knew that their mother, too, was a twin, and Elspeth her sister. Julia and Valentina are semi-normal American teenagers--with seemingly little interest in college, finding jobs, or anything outside their cozy home in the suburbs of Chicago, and with an abnormally intense attachment to one another.

The girls move to Elspeth's flat, which borders Highgate Cemetery in London. They come to know the building's other residents. There is Martin, a brilliant and charming crossword puzzle setter suffering from crippling Obsessive Compulsive Disorder; Marjike, Martin's devoted but trapped wife; and Robert, Elspeth's elusive lover, a scholar of the cemetery. As the girls become embroiled in the fraying lives of their aunt's neighbors, they also discover that much is still alive in Highgate, including--perhaps--their aunt, who can't seem to leave her old apartment and life behind.

First Line: "Elspeth died while Robert was standing in front of a vending machine watching tea shoot into a small plastic cup."

Random Quote: "London was baking under a cloudless July sky. Robert reclined on a decrepit wicker chair in Jessica Bates's back garden, a gin and tonic sweating in his hand."

Image by Emily Barney via Flickr

Review: I find this author incredibly frustrating and had the same experience with this book that I did with The Time Traveler's Wife. I spent the first 100 to 150 pages being utterly delighted and thinking, "This is such a cool idea for a book! I love the setting and the atmosphere! This is going to be such a good read!" I then spent the rest of the book becoming more and more disenchanted and frustrated.

Niffenegger has the potential to be an amazing writer. She's obviously very creative and she is extremely skilled at creating interesting characters (even if I hate some of them) and putting them in interesting settings. My problem with her is that once she's got everyone on stage, she doesn't seem to know what to do with them and she spends an enormous amount of time with her characters wandering about the cool stage set in random patterns, picking things up and putting them down in different places, and stepping all over each others' toes in the process. Meanwhile, way over there in the unlit corner is the actual story - too bad you can't see it. In this book, the buried and undertold story is that of Martin and Marijke - hemmed in by Martin's OCD like the crossword puzzles he designs.

There are some other beautiful little vignettes here - Jessica and her love for Highgate Cemetary, Robert and his loss of Elspeth. Least interesting is the drama at the center of the book - Elspeth and her twin nieces - none of them likeable and, in fact, unlikeable for no good reason. The decisions about these characters and how to portray them are maddeningly poor. There is no build to who they are, no sense of internal logic, they're all just randomly Bad as if a small child was told to draw the wicked witch and she came out as a ghost and a pair of twins.

Then there is the absolute waste of an amazing setting - the funny apartment building with its garden gate opening into Highgate Cemetary, Highgate itself, and London with its hidden nooks and crannies and tube stations and buses and tourist attractions and hat shops. There's the flat the twins inherit - filled with the remnants of their aunt's life - her clothes, her shoes, and most ignored her rare books (Elsepeth was a dealer in rare books - not that you'd know it from reading about her, just a few bare mentions of rare first editions). Again, the stage set is amazing, but that's not all that's needed and the sheer waste of this one is infuriating.

I really want to like this writer and I'm sure I'll give a third book a try, but I really want her to make some decisions about what she wants to do. Everything doesn't have to have a coherent plot - it's okay to populate a stage set with interesting people who don't do a whole lot more than be interesting, but I hope in future she'll stop rabbiting around looking for the Big Plot Point because it just gums up the works and ruins what could be two wonderful books.