Elliot Perlman, Seven Types of Ambiguity
I was very intrigued by this book about which I read excellent reviews. I love the principle of a story told by multiple narrators, and I have had very good reading experiences with such novels (two of them come to mind right now: Ian Pears’s An Instance of the Fingerpost, and Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible). Unfortunately, Seven Types of Ambiguity, which looked promising and ambitious, didn’t quite reach my expectations…
Seven Types of Ambiguity revolves around a single unexplained act of madness: Simon, a man still in love with his university sweetheart, Anna, ten years after their break-up, kidnaps Sam, the son she had with her husband Joe Geraghty. Seven characters narrate their lives and how they are impacted by this event, and the kidnapping itself only represents the starting point of the unraveling of a series of consequences, either positive or negative, for each one of them.
The premises look interesting, but I had several problems with the novel. First of all, with its 600 pages of rather small writing, I found it too long. Not that I am afraid of a big book, but, as I already said in other reviews, a writer who takes the chance on embarking the reader on a +500 pages book should really strive to hook his reader and keep him hooked. Seven Types of Ambiguity should have been edited more thoroughly: there were to many lengthy or redundant passages in my opinion. The various parts are unequally interesting: the one narrated by Simon almost made me give up… Generally, there are too many long digressions about subjects unlinked to the main theme of the book, which is obsessive love: digressions include gambling, the healthcare system, literary deconstructionists, etc. which Perlman seems to have knowledge about and had to absolutely place somewhere… Also, Perlman does not give much credit to the reader: At one point, Joe, a stockbroker, is about to make the deal of his life. He explains carefully how it works and what the implications are at each level, which is good because it is pretty complicated. But was it necessary for every narrator after him to explain this all over again? I don’t think so… On the bright side, I loved the whole part narrated by Mitch, which is maybe the less relevant to the overall plot, but which introduced a hilarious depiction of a "Personal Effectiveness Program", a 4-day seminar to make better and more effective employees: this passage was Perlman’s genuinely brilliant breakthrough in the novel!
My second problem was with the different narrators. As I said before, I love a story told by multiple voices, but they have to sound different. Here, we have no such impression at all: there is only one voice telling the same story from different perspectives. The story is first told by Alex, a psychiatrist who sounds learned and pedantic. The problem is that every other narrator after him also sounds learned and pedantic, even if they don’t come from the same socio-economical background. Also, the two women narrators sound exactly like the men. I consider that the author failed to bring several narrators alive. Maybe one needs to be at least a little schizophrenic to render all those different personalities, Perlman certainly isn’t, and the title is a lie: I certainly didn’t see seven types of ambiguities there!
Last but not least, though the story was mostly interesting, it was also too thin to be stretched over 600 pages, in this I found Perlman’s project overly ambitious. This story only deserved 300 pages, not more.
Well, I can’t really recommend this novel for the reasons mentioned above. If you like stories told by several narrators, try An Instance of the Fingerpost or The Poisonwood Bible instead. This being said, it was not a bad book, not even one I regret reading, just one that failed to impress me…
Rating: 3/5
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