The Interpretation of Murder
Feb. 12th, 2020 01:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearI picked up The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld at the book exchange at my local train station. Having just finished it today, I'm very conflicted about it, since I really enjoyed it, whilst at the same time finding its treatment of, presentation of and attitudes towards women absolutely appalling.
I do like the premise - a gap in the historical records of Freud's trip to America and a seemingly unreasonable attitude of Freud's towards America after this trip. The book seeks to propose what may have happened during the trip to upset him so much. However, the main plot of a young psychoanalyst being asked to consult on a murder actually has very little to do with Freud, and the subplot about the threat to Freud's lecture series at an American university has no real connection to this main plot thread, so seems a bit by the by.
The way the story comes together is clever, if rather too convoluted for my taste, and the writing is pacy and compelling. Though, at least to begin with, the author seems very keen for the reader to know just how much research he's done into the society and geography of New York in 1909, including large passages of exposition and description.
And so on to the women... They are dismissed, mocked, disparaged or objectified throughout. Even the coroner's reaction to the corpse at the start is couched in terms of her beauty, which is a bit icky. The protagonist falls in love with his 17-year-old patient. And, when she tells him she's gay, his response is to try to kiss her. I hate the way their relationship progresses and ends up, particularly with her incredibly convenient 18th birthday...
The point of view shifts in the narrative are also a bit offputting. Dr Younger gets a first person POV, but also appears as a character in some of the third person perspective scenes, and the number of POV characters overall gets a bit too many towards the end.
There's basically only one character in the whole thing who isn't awful, and that's Detective Littlemore, who at least treats everyone with due respect, is actually nice to people, and manages to get leads in the case by doing good deeds and keeping to his principles. So, it seems like the author know what a good person is - he just decided to make most of his characters terrible for some reason.
There's a lot of monologuing to explain everything at the end, which is always a bit tiresome, and there were so many twists to the story that it was difficult to follow in some parts of the explanation.
So, it's really sounds like I didn't enjoy it at all - but I did, for some reason! It kept me interested all the way through and I was very keen to find out how it would all work out in the end. So, a bit baffled by my response to this one!
I do like the premise - a gap in the historical records of Freud's trip to America and a seemingly unreasonable attitude of Freud's towards America after this trip. The book seeks to propose what may have happened during the trip to upset him so much. However, the main plot of a young psychoanalyst being asked to consult on a murder actually has very little to do with Freud, and the subplot about the threat to Freud's lecture series at an American university has no real connection to this main plot thread, so seems a bit by the by.
The way the story comes together is clever, if rather too convoluted for my taste, and the writing is pacy and compelling. Though, at least to begin with, the author seems very keen for the reader to know just how much research he's done into the society and geography of New York in 1909, including large passages of exposition and description.
And so on to the women... They are dismissed, mocked, disparaged or objectified throughout. Even the coroner's reaction to the corpse at the start is couched in terms of her beauty, which is a bit icky. The protagonist falls in love with his 17-year-old patient. And, when she tells him she's gay, his response is to try to kiss her. I hate the way their relationship progresses and ends up, particularly with her incredibly convenient 18th birthday...
The point of view shifts in the narrative are also a bit offputting. Dr Younger gets a first person POV, but also appears as a character in some of the third person perspective scenes, and the number of POV characters overall gets a bit too many towards the end.
There's basically only one character in the whole thing who isn't awful, and that's Detective Littlemore, who at least treats everyone with due respect, is actually nice to people, and manages to get leads in the case by doing good deeds and keeping to his principles. So, it seems like the author know what a good person is - he just decided to make most of his characters terrible for some reason.
There's a lot of monologuing to explain everything at the end, which is always a bit tiresome, and there were so many twists to the story that it was difficult to follow in some parts of the explanation.
So, it's really sounds like I didn't enjoy it at all - but I did, for some reason! It kept me interested all the way through and I was very keen to find out how it would all work out in the end. So, a bit baffled by my response to this one!
