One more thing about the book I just finished, then.
A great writer who creates literature differs from an OK author who provides entertainment in that she doesn’t try to soothe the readers’ anxieties by providing forced happy endings or explanations. An artist doesn’t speak to an audience. She’s in conversation with God, and audiences can listen in if they want.
Emma Cline’s The Guest is a wonderful example of a writer who is confident enough not to provide convenient explanations for why Alex is such a self-defeating layabout. Cline is not interested in how readers handle the anxiety they feel when faced with an eruption of chaos into daily life.
Taffy Brodesser-Ackner is talented but nowhere on the level of Emma Cline just yet. This is why she does provide an explanation for her characters’ dysfunction. To do that, she uses a real-life kidnapping of a rich Jewish businessman (with his consent) and turns a similar kidnapping into the root cause of her characters’ failure at life.
The kidnapping in question was that of Jack Teich in 1974. Brodesser-Ackner knows Teich and his family, and she recognizes in the Afterword that they did not experience anything remotely like the unraveling that her characters did. 1970s were a different era, and people simply didn’t know that it was OK to become a total wreck because your father was kidnapped before you were born.
The enormous difference between life and fiction in no way detracts from the quality of Brodesser-Ackner’s book. It’s a great novel, although definitely not everybody’s cup of tea.
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