Jessi Jezewska Stevens

“You are who you let in,” muses the main character who is dealing with the regular appearance of a gnome-like argumentative man living in her apartment. The Visitors explores our modern sense of fear, loneliness, and identity in a world where the 1% strive and the rest struggle. C is trying to save her business, her relationship with her best friend, and her health, while living in a world she feels disconnected to; she is sometimes a visitor to her own life. While an excellent concept and some beautiful writing, this one ultimately was too disjointed by the end.… (meer)

This book takes place within blocks of the Occupy Wall Street encampment but its characters have no more than a lazy curiousity about the movement. One character is a hedge fund manager, another owns a failing store --she can't pay the bills but is about to hire an assistant. The fact that she won't be able to pay the assistant? Not her problem, apparently. This sounds ripe for satire, right? Two leaches getting their comeuppance as the shouts of Occupiers rise in the background? Wrong. We're meant to like these hyper-privileged, self-obsessed women who personify everything Occupy resisted.

It's not that the characters are flawed and we're meant to maintain an ironic distance from their failings. The narrator mentions the illegal police use of kettling protesters in the early days of the Occupy protest: "those arrested are herded to precinct headquarters and issued a carton of milk, a peanut butter sandwich, and a misdemeanor for blocking traffic on the Brooklyn overpass" (78). In reality, people were assaulted, seriously injured, and the city had to pay millions in lawsuits for their use of this violation of civil rights. Later, the narrator tries to use the UN as a metaphor but fails because the author doesn't understand that the US has one of the largest outstanding UN debts and does not, in fact, "disproportionately financ[e]" the organization" (177). The book is full of blithe ignorance and callous indifference to facts like that. In a book that's trying to make some kind of muddled political point, it's naive at best, deceptive at worst. It's just a crap book.

Formally, the book was interesting (as are almost all of the books And Other Stories publish -- such a great publisher!) and the writing itself was, at times, engaging, but that wasn't enough to salvage this mess.… (meer)

Not my cup of tea, as it turns out. Some interesting ideas in here, but not much of a plot, and the characters were not those I could find a way to care much about.

I'm sure this will appeal to plenty of folks, but alas I found this to be something of a navel-gazing story of New York folk trying to find their place in a callous world - not exactly unexplored territory. Further, this is the type of book beloved by those who will tell you how smart it is so that when you cannot find it enjoyable, or particularly enlightening, they can hammer you with the fact that you just don't "get it." Which is fine. But other such books (The Last Samurai comes to mind) are often more willing to include more engaging plots, characters, or both. I had trouble finding much of that here, though the mysterious gnome did occasionally introduce some personality (of a sort) into the proceedings. And as a personal gripe, I think I've had enough of novels who cannot even name the main character beyond a single letter (though this may just be a pet peeve of mine). And as a personal gripe, I think I've had enough of novels who cannot even name the main character beyond a single letter (though this may just be a pet peeve of mine).

All that said, I don't wish to dissuade anyone from reading, as there were indeed some interesting musings here. But as a novel, this one felt lacking to me.… (meer)