Because….. REASONS!

As the plot progresses, the reader is given more…. well…. plot. Piercy has absolutely nothing to say with the novel she has written. As I read I want to see something to analyze, I’ll take anything. Unfortunately the novel only provides story, the characters are just two dimensional, and serve no purpose. Any one of the characters could easily be replaced by a lamp and I wouldn’t notice. Additionally, the themes that the book covers also serve no purpose. There is just absolutely nothing to enjoy.

Have any of you see the movie Gattaca? Remember how well that movie handled the theme of selective/controlled breeding? All the dangers that come with the advancement of science? Great stuff, right? Well Piercy gives her readers this glimpse at the ultimate Utopia, but what is the purpose of it? Well guys, it’s to… well… ummmmmmm, to sound nice I guess? There are no consequences of the perfection of Piercy’s Utopia. It exacts simply because, the reader is given no idea of how it might have been a struggle to create such a perfect world or the drawbacks of a perfect world. That is just boring. It reminds me of the superman character: he is completely perfect with no reason for it. Maybe of Piercy would show us the back story of this utopia there would be something interesting to read, but she doesn’t. Imagine if Piercy had written the story so that every time Consuelo travels into the future she goes to a further away time. Each time showing the struggle of that society and the work being put into improving them, with Consuelo eventually seeing the result as a Utopia. That scenario saws something, it shows the difficulty of creating a Utopia, but makes the pay off worth it. In Piercy’s novel, since the reader is just teleported to a Utopia, it just makes the reader question why we haven’t done it if it’s that easy.

That obvious flaw aside another thing that pisses me off is that there is no questioning the reality of the Connie’s experience. I want to believe she is actually traveling to the future, but all the reader is shown is that the character is just a complete loon. Clearly such a perfect society could only be the product of the mental fantasies of a mentally challenged woman confined in a institution. There is nothing that makes me question whether these vision are real. Hell, she even runs into a girl that  looks exactly like Angelina. So, Piercy, is the reader just suppose to accept this as coincidence? Or is this suppose to hint to the reader that the utopia, and the characters that mirror people she knew, are just part of her delusion? Because to do that the reader would need reason to question her reality to begin with. Black swan is a great example, one moment the audience is grounded in reality convinced that the actions that have happened were real, the next you realize that it was all part of the characters delusion. Another great example is American Psycho.

All in all this book has not gotten any better and it is a complete drain to read it. I have to take a break from reading it about every five minutes. I’m not looking forward to talking about the book at all. Can we all talk about the overarching themes of the books we read before this one instead? Oh, also, in my previous post I mentioned how a character needs to be developed and interesting before diving into their back story; Piercy should take some notes from the Daredevil series.

1 thought on “Because….. REASONS!

  1. Definitely agree with your last paragraph. I forced myself to read ahead to the next block of chapters, and it FINALLY gets a little interesting. But its too little, too late. I shouldn’t have to read 10 chapters to finally find something interesting.

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