Dear Listener,

It took me nearly two months to finish The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst.  Although I read several books while “reading” The Stranger’s Child, and was a little tied down with work (Christmas season in the retail business? Sheesh!), it was the tediousness of the book that kept pushing me away.  When asked to describe it, my most frequently used words were “dry”, “British”, and “incredibly dry and British.”  Frankly, my words could have been harsher.  After Christmas ended, I decided it was time to finish this jerk-of-a-book so I could finally return to reading the books that had been stacking up without the guilt of denying an ending to the one I had started.  Then something astonishing happened.  

It is extremely rare for me to leave a book unfinished once I have started it.  Occasionally this is something I find rueful (i.e. Infinite Jest), but for the most part I would rather have an ending that I hate than hating a book that I haven’t finished.  The Stranger’s Child was not a book that I hated, but I might had I not finished it.  It is not as if the ending is necessarily even the payoff, but it helps the reader understand that the book is not as much based around the importance of a plot as it is around a group of ideas: sexuality, aging, memory, and fact.  When the stage was finally set, and the point was made, the book was done and I was happy.

With that said, I had less difficulty dealing with the book as an American than I did as a heterosexual.  In her review for The Guardian, Emma Brockes wrote, “in different hands [The Stranger’s Child] might be called ‘Gay Men and the Women Who Marry Them’.”  I like to think of myself as an understanding person, and it is not something that really even necessarily bothers me, but it simply creates a plot that is less relatable to me.  I suppose it wasn’t the plot that I focused on in the end anyway.

Here’s a video for the British band Yuck.  They are signed to the slightly local Fat Possum Records.  Much like The Stranger’s Child, Yuck’s self titled album has landed on many best-of 2011 lists.

by Simon

 

Share