Blame It On Too Much Cheap Wine

As befits a novel called Blame, the team gathered to assign a little. After a brief bit of rote business wherein Chris Lake encouraged all to "sandwich with compliments", the knives came out. So here is a slice of compliment bread at the top--this novel united us. United us in hate. It was a novel in an Arrested Development world devoid of irony, a Veronica Mars world devoid of a troublemaker, a 90210 world devoid of camp. And the blame fell squarely upon author Michelle Huneven.

Blame failed to provoke insightful commentary from the gathered assembly. The lead character was deemed too empty, her struggles too non-existent, events too pointless for it to be otherwise. No reflection on our own drinking was prompted--deeply problematic, considering alcoholism's centrality as a theme. But Pasty's blessed lifestyle as one of the idle rich was simply too perfect and too annoying for us to get past. For a novel called Blame, Patsy remains remarkably free from consequences. The deaths of two people seem to be little more than speedbumps in Patsy's blessed life. She has one bad encounter in lock-up, spends two years at a minimum security summer camp with an ocean view, is released back into her job, house, and gay boyfriend, and goes on to marry the Saint of AA, live on his fabulous ranch, and finally leaves him to die while she runs off with someone her own age. Oh, and she eventually learns that she was merely passenger in the car that fateful night, a revelation that comes so late in her life and the novel that the driver has long since died, rendering any possible significance moot, save finally revealing the intent behind the name "Patsy", which was met with resounding groans.

Yes, discussion was a laundry list of issues with the novel--no conflict, no remorse, no struggle, over-blown and absent sufferings, far more potentially interesting peripheral characters, far more interesting structures that might have been attempted, the obvious fingerprints of write-by-numbers MFA programs, etc, etc. Coming after Atwood's intriguing gamesmanship with quotation marks, Huneven's showy non-use of them was annoying and distracting. Next to the sufferings of Offred and Vladek, or even the hoodrats of Lush Life and From Hell, or the family of The Echo Maker, Patsy's gay bestie giving her a catty nickname doesn't quite rate. We, The Order of the Franzia, just can't be brought to care about the idle rich. There must have been some cool kids somewhere in the universe of Blame, and we'd much rather have been hanging out with them.