The Beginners

Like other reviewers, I found myself reading this book simply to get it over with, primarily because I received it through Early Reviewers and wanted to give it a fair read.

There's nothing wrong with the prose itself, really; it's not exceptional, but the sentences are more or less well-constructed. The prose is fairly dreamlike, in a sort of oppressive, nostalgic way, which I think helps to cover up the naked improbability of the story itself. The book has a lot of problems, both from a narrative perspective and from a plot perspective, that keep it from being the compelling read that the plot summary promises it to be.

Some reviewers have objected to the narrator, a fifteen-year-old with a vocabulary and voice way beyond her years, and show more I think I was willing to believe in the narrator's voice, or at least to suspend my disbelief on that point, until about halfway through the novel, when it became clear that the story was going to abandon all the potentially interesting directions the plot could go in favor of doing absolutely nothing. By the time our young heroine starts addressing the reader directly to tell us she's leaving things out for our protection, she and the novel have lost me completely.

Wolff sets her novel in the fictional town of Wick, Massachusetts, on the shores of the fictional Rampack Reservoir, which is clearly modeled on the massive Quabbin Reservoir, which feeds the city of Boston and the surrounding area, and for which four towns were leveled and flooded in the 1930s. She also invokes the specter of the Salem witch trials in the person of Raquel, who may or may not be researching a book which may or may not be based on her own family's involvement in that tragic episode. The story of the building of the Quabbin is a pretty interesting one, but Wolff's forays in this direction are limited to mentions of abandoned roads and rumors that entire houses lie submerged beneath the reservoir's surface. Similarly, the witch trials lurk in the background, but unexplored and unexploited, to no apparent purpose.

Instead, Wolff chooses to set a story of coming-of-age and sexual awakening against this hastily-sketched backdrop, with an emphasis on the sex and hardly a nod to the coming-of-age, since no one seems to grow in any sort of understanding from one end of the book to the other. The sex, though, gets described in lurid and uncomfortable detail, so if that's your thing, you may appreciate this book more than I did. What sex there is seems to exist largely for its own sake, without illustrating any greater point about sex and the adolescent or sex and humanity generally. What could be interesting about a teenage girl becoming fascinated by or being taken advantage of by a young couple who are new to the largely closed world of her tiny remote town is utterly lost in the shifting accounts the couple give of themselves. They read as props in a sort of paper-doll world, not characters so much as symbols or ideas, and the same can be said of all the characters in the narrator's orbit. This could be, I suppose, a narrative technique, but it comes across as inept characterization and poor storytelling.

Ultimately, this is a book in which almost nothing happens, and no one cares. No choice has any negative consequence, it appears; nothing is at stake, and so no real action is ever necessary. It's an unsatisfying, rather grueling read, and the unexplored potential of the background elements only makes it more so. show less

“I was standing there in my usual spot behind to counter at the Top Hat Café, looking down, thinking about evil, buttering toast.”

The Beginners takes us into the life of fifteen-year-old Ginger Pritt and her life growing up in a too-small town. While her best friend Cherry has taken to chasing boys, Ginger feels enslaved by her own innocence until the arrival of a sophisticated couple from the city who take a keen interest in her. But who are they and why are they so interested in her while so uninterested in the rest of the town?

The Beginners is supposed to be a dark, tragic, coming-of-age story for young Ginger. And for the first twenty pages or so it offers a promising start. The trouble is that the entire story goes absolutely show more nowhere. Worse than being unlikable, Ginger is unknowable. She acts as nothing other than an observer to events that crawl along with no tension and no forward momentum. It is as though Wolff decided to recreate a journal of her own adolescence – a set of thoughts and feelings that are far more gripping to the author than to anyone else. And no matter how many flowery descriptions of what the room looked like and how much time Wollf spent glued to her thesaurus, The Beginners is never able to get beyond reading like an encyclopedia entry. While it may be true that a novel with a narrator who is an observer can work quite well (ie, Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby) it requires that the characters she is observing be interesting and there be a change in either her or the people she is observing as a result of some kind of action. None of this happens in The Beginners. In addition, Wolff’s writing isn’t so much lyrical as it is overwritten. It doesn’t just feel like trudging through some girl’s diary – if feels like trudging through some uninteresting girl’s diary who writes too much.

Frankly, The Beginners was both boring and painful to read. There was no coming-of-age. There was no suspense. There was not a single interesting character in the whole story. Somehow, Wolff even managed to make a rape feel boring. No small feat. While there may be “a million stories in the naked city,” that doesn’t mean that they are all interesting. This is one book not to waste your time on.

I received my advanced copy of The Beginners from the Goodreads Early Reviewer program. show less

In this unsettling novel, know-it-all 15-year-old Ginger Pritt is seduced by newcomers to her small town, Theo and Raquel Motherwell.

The tone throughout is sinister, but Ginger is such an unsympathetic character that this reader hoped for something unpleasant to happen to her. None of the other major characters (the Motherwells and Ginger's friend Cherry) are particularly interesting. The mechanics of the writing are good, with some stunning lines and descriptions, but the meaning is tedious. The plot circles around several threads, including dreams, the town's history, and Ginger's obsession with sex, but nothing engages the reader. This reader would have stopped reading by page 10 if she weren't writing a review for the Early show more Reviewers program. One star overall, with an extra half star for the writing. show less

I feel pulled in two directions by "The Beginners". On the one hand, Wolff's novel has a gothic, dreamy (or nightmarish) feel to it that sucks you in immediately. I was attracted to this book because it has a couple themes I enjoy: coming of age, spooky stories set in New England, a character who is an academic studying the Salem Witch Trials, etc.

However, as the story picks up, it takes some twists that readers may find very uncomfortable (spoiler: an underage girl has sex with an older man, multiple times). In fact, the overall tone of the book is bound to make many readers uncomfortable. Some reviews have called the book "pretentious". I actually admire the author for aiming to write something dark and different, but I feel that show more where she could have said something interesting about the desires and needs of young women, she instead took a turn for the near-exploitative.

"The Beginners" is interesting and probably like nothing you've read before. But it may leave you feeling disappointed and creeped out. show less

The Beginners tells the story of fifteen year old Ginger Pritt, who lives in the small Massachusetts town of Wick. Ginger is immediately captivated by the young, charismatic married couple, Raquel and Theo Motherwell, who move to town. Ginger slowly realizes that Raquel and Theo are nothing like what they appear to be.

While the Beginners do have some interesting ideas, the novel is so badly and overly written that the story is almost immediately bogged down in constant, over-blown descriptions. Ginger is supposedly a mature fifteen year old. But she doesn’t seem to question why an adult couple would be inviting her to stay over with them, describing to her the most intimate details of their sex life, skinny dipping in from of her show more teenage class mates and plying her with alcohol. The story devolves from there, meandering from one unbelievable set up to the next. Despite all the flowery prose, in the end readers are left with these facts: Ginger is an introspective, selfishly absorbed teenager with the vocabulary of a 55 year old college professor but the insight of a ten year old. Theo is a sexual predator with Raquel as his knowing accomplice. Gingers supposedly doting parents are almost criminally negligent in how they ignore their daughter disappearing for chunks of time with this couple whom they know nothing about it. In the end it is left to one of the minor characters of the book and supposed town bad boy, Randy, to restore order and separate Ginger from the Motherwell’s.

If you are on the lookout for a well written, languid, mysterious novel set in a small New England town, keep looking. The Beginners will only disappoint. show less

I was really looking forward to this "coming of age" tale. However, it appears I was not alone in not understanding what the heck this book was about.

Ginger, a 15 year old semi-Goth precocious junior in high school works at the local diner in a small hamlet in central Mass. In a town where everyone (and their parents) were born and raised, in walks two new people - Raquel and Theo Motherwell. They invite Ginger over to their house, and she goes with her best friend Cherry. The rest of the book is told in a dream-like and spooky poetic prose about Ginger's months being "under the spell" of the Motherwell's.

Are they in the town to research Raquel's family? Were they recently discharged from an institution? The stories and explainations show more change and are never made clear.

Nothing in this book is resolved, which I found unsettling. I finished it to "find out" and felt cheated when there was nothing to "find out." show less

Like several other reviewers, I finished The Beginners not out of enjoyment, or intellectual curiosity, but rather out of duty to the LTER program.

In a small town in New England, the narrator, fifteen year old Ginger Pritt meets Raquel and Theo Motherwell, a couple who from the beginning can only be described as creepy. At first it seems that Ginger simply has a crush on these seemingly cool young adults with their vague, academic and family histories and to her eye, sophisticated behaviors. To Ginger, the Motherwell's are an exciting, exotic contrast to the monotony and drudgery of her small town. Her crush deepens as the Motherwell’s hold on her tightens: she virtually abandons her friends, her family, and her whole life show more pre-Motherwell. But Raquel Motherwell is depressed and unstable, at best, and Theo Motherwell is a controlling and violent bastard who eventually seduces Ginger. She remains stuck in this triangle as the story and her telling of it become more hideous and disturbed.

The Beginners may properly be characterized as a coming of age story. But it is also about family and friendship and longing and loss, and about sexual awakening, although unfortunately the sex in The Beginners is generally unpleasant, bordering on violent. I liked the Ginger character. She was introspective, loyal and true, intellectually smart, but so very naïve and not sufficiently confident to trust her own instinct or assert herself. She loved her family, but wanted to distance herself from them. She cherished the security of her home town, but wanted to know the world beyond. In short, she is like a lot of young people coming into their own. Unfortunately the author tries to make all this much more mysterious than it is. The historical setting: the rise and fall of New England industry and commerce and the history of persecution of suspected witches, could have been interesting and given the story greater depth if it was used more meaningfully.

The quotes on the book cover compare the author to Mary Gaitskill and Emily Bronte. I don’t think so.

Thanks to LTER for the opportunity to read and review this book. show less