Just reading the lines off the page
Though evened out by moments of humor, The Agnostics is a long-spanning family saga
By Gili Warset
Published: October 23rd, 2007 | 10:13am
Wendy Rawlings’ first novel, The Agnostics, tells the story of a family’s experience with divorce, interfaith marriage, lesbianism, eating disorders, and alcoholism. Her four main characters, two middle-class Long Island parents, and their daughters come of age while questioning the existence of a God, how to be true to oneself, and what it means to grow up as society confronts war, AIDS, and consumerism.
Rawlings may have bitten off more than she could chew, giving the reader a saga spanning two generations. Often her attempt to incorporate the political climate seems coincidentally connected to one family. References to AIDS, for example, are often stuck into the narrative. “Joan had gotten her a book by her favorite writer, Alice Hoffman, about a child dying of AIDS contracted from a blood transfusion. A whole literature was springing up. They’d had three friends die this year.” These tangents are never tied back to the plot. Why does the reader need to know this? What does it mean to live and watch people die in the time of AIDS? The writing suffers from this convoluted narration.
In the beginning, the story moves slowly through the evolution of the parents’ early years together. Rawlings describes the action at one party, “They were practicing lines from a script. But not their script. The lines didn’t convince, they were just mechanical movement.” The passage actually describes my feeling about most of the book. These characters are acting out their parts and the play is stale. For most of the book, the tone is shockingly distant and detached. We’re waiting for the surprise.
The moments of stiffness are evened out by moments of humor. One of the main characters has just learned of Clinton’s “cigar play” with Monica Lewinski and she listens in at a bar while men discuss whether there is anything better than this sex act in the Oval Office. “Maybe a blow job in the space shuttle. On Air Force One. Flying Over Red Square.”
Despite that, The Agnostics gives off a self-consciousness that never goes away, like the book is desperate to be politically relevant. In effect, the human qualities of Rawlings’ characters become the biggest casualties. We keep reading with the book as it spans generations of political change, waiting for the people in it to take off and get a little messy. Sorry, but they never do.
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