The Weird Sisters

There are a lot of reasons I felt I had to read Eleanor's Brown's new novel The Weird Sisters sooner rather than later. There's the fact that she has said the college is a combination of Kenyon and Oberlin. There was Eleanor saying that she must have gone into the future to write it (as she said, the author's got my name, it's about where I grew up, and they talk in literary tropes like we do). And then there were Kim's "5 Reasons You Should Read The Weird Sisters."

But the book didn't live up to my expectations. The most interesting thing about it is the way it's told, as if the three sisters could share each others' thoughts. Still, the use of the archaic definition of the word "weird" as "fate" to define the sisters just doesn't work for me. Maybe it's because I don't have a sister and am not infrequently irritated by the cutesy way some of my friends and relatives have taught their daughters to act with each other (a problem with relating to the characters in this book that my own daughter will share), but I don't understand or much like the whole premise about how a sister's life is defined by her place in the birth order and her role as a sister.

Brown is a good storyteller, and she gets a lot of the details about a small, college town just right. Things are just too tidy in the story, though. What she misses are the rivalries and small, petty annoyances that grow inevitably between proud, intelligent people who have to rub elbows with each other for too many years. All of the small-town folks in The Weird Sisters are pleasant and welcoming to the sisters when they come back home. They offer them jobs and food and love. Not one reveals any festering jealousy from way back when.

The plot is fairly standard chick-lit fare (when I described it to a friend of mine who is a tenured professor at Kenyon, she called it "highbrow chick lit"). One sister realizes, towards the end of the novel, that her mother, a homemaker (there's an accurate detail; there are more of those in small college towns than in the world in general) was probably more self-actualized by cooking, gardening and reading than she would have been by getting a job. I do love this passage:
"Barnwell is full of people like our mother, married to spouses who dragged them to the middle of a cornfield and set off for the academic races with no more than a kiss and a cheerful exhortation to go ahead and build a life for themselves in the middle of nothing."

Despite the fact that I really don't like any of the characters--the thieving, adulterous sister, the blindly ambitious one, or the apathetic hippie wanna-be--I do like some of the ways they relate to the world. They think it's natural to always have a book with you, as does almost everyone I know. And they have one of the most satisfying answers to the perennial "How do you have time to read" question that I've heard in a while:
"Because I don't spend hours flipping through cable complaining there's nothing on? Because my entire Sunday is not eaten up with pre-game, in-game, and post-game talking heads? Because I do not spend every night drinking overpriced beer and engaging in dick-swinging contests with the other financirati? Because when I am waiting in line, at the gym, on the train, eating lunch, I am not complaining about the wait/staring into space/admiring myself in available reflective surfaces?"

Readers will like this book, and women with sisters will like it even better. I like it for its description of the dynamics of a family which "has always communicated its deepest feelings through the words of a man who has been dead for almost four hundred years," although I do find this fictional family's adherence to quoting only one author oddly narrow.

Perhaps I expected too much from this book. If I had gone into it thinking it would be like a new novel from Jennifer Crusie or Weiner, I'd have been pleasantly surprised.