A Review of Zoe Whittall’s “The Spectacular”
Part Rock ’n’ Roll Spectacle
When you call your new novel The Spectacular, you’re setting your readers up for expectations. If they like the read, they will certainly call it “spectacular,” after all. And if they don’t like it, they might call it a “spectacular failure.” But what about those readers in the middle who might find the read to be “spectacularly mediocre?” That’s kind of where I sit with this book, a novel that I enjoyed, but found to be narratively uneven. Despite that criticism, there’s something about The Spectacular that will keep you flipping pages, even if some of the characters might turn you off. This is a book that is essentially about outsiders, and what it means to be a family when you’re among outsiders, and that’s what makes the book a compelling one to read — even with its liabilities.
The book begins in the late 1990s. We meet twentysomething Missy, who is a cellist in an “indie rock” band (signed to a major label, natch), who, upon introduction, declares that she wants to get her tubes tied so she can have as much indiscriminate sex with her groupies and bandmates as possible (and not get pregnant) as she goes on tour across the United States. However, as drug residue is found in her possession at the Canada-U.S. border as the band tries to re-enter the States after touring Vancouver, Missy is left stranded in Canada where she is forced to go live with her father’s grandmother, Ruth, near Montreal. Meanwhile, the book is also told from the viewpoint of Missy’s mother, Carola, who was once a member of a commune in New England but has gone on to join a yoga cult where its leader was having illegal sex with its group members. After being questioned by the police, we learn that Carola has been estranged from her daughter and, through Ruth, is brought back to Missy to get reacquainted. Additionally, the middle part of the novel is told from the perspective of Ruth, who is in her 80s and dying from a terminal illness. She wants to return to the home she fled in Turkey so she can bury the remains of her sister. The last part of the book largely recounts Missy’s attempts at reconciliation with her mother in the year 2013, and Missy’s attempts to become a mother herself as she approaches her 40s and couples with a woman who has transitioned into being a man. (So much for Missy wanting to get her tubes tied in the first place if she ultimately wanted to get pregnant!)
As you can tell, there’s an awful lot that is going on in The Spectacular and I am of two minds about it. On the one hand, the book feels an awful lot like life and all its messiness and loose structure. So it is a highly realistic novel and reads like a diary in many ways. However, this also means that the narrative jumps around all over the place. For a while, Missy is so enamoured by her new boyfriend to a point where she forgets that she wants to get pregnant, which is the plot point that is driving the latter half of the book! So, again, the novel is particularly uneven in places. I must wonder how much this novel was worked on in terms of the number of drafts that were written because Whittall’s Wikipedia page notes that The Spectacular was supposed to come out in 2019, but its publication seemingly got delayed by two years. I’m not sure of the reason for that, but I suspect that there might have been behind-the-scenes rewrites happening to smooth out some of the transitions, perhaps leading to other problems with the narrative. I don’t know. But, in the end, The Spectacular is incredibly disjointed.
The other main problem I had with this book is the fact that the main character isn’t exactly loveable. I get that Missy is meant to be something of a feminist role model: that you can be sassy and promiscuous, and still want to be a mother, and be a strong-willed woman in much the same way that men who are “studs” can be looked up to. So I do get the point of the character (and the book) and I’d imagine that there will be women out there who will be quite taken by Missy. However, Missy is not my type of woman as a character in a book. I guess I like women who want to be rescued, and that’s my quirk, and I feel uncomfortable around women who assert themselves. This I found to be true of Missy: I found that I wasn’t liking her at the start of the book, and found the tales of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll she partook in to sort of be old hat. I’ve read books like this before. For these reasons, I found the chapters that dealt with Carola, who is a flawed character, too, to be more interesting. Outside of Jonathan Lethem’s Dissident Gardens, I haven’t read too many novels that are set in communes, so I was particularly interested by that aspect of the read, even if living in a commune is certainly not the life for me! In any event, as I write this all down, I’ve come to realize that my interactions with the characters of this book align with how I feel about partnering with women of certain stripes, so maybe take all of this with a grain of salt.
At the end of the day, The Spectacular is not a bad book despite its flaws. I did enjoy it and gradually warmed up to Missy as a character. I was also happy to see transgendered people get their due in fiction, and the book’s theme of queerness was a breath of fresh air, even though I’m a straight cisgendered male. In short, The Spectacular was probably not quite the book for me in terms of being in the audience for it, but I did find things to like about it. I think it would be the perfect book for women’s studies classes or female-friendly book clubs, as there’s a lot to chew on here about what it means to be a woman and a mother in today’s society — even if the book is set in the recent past. Let me put it this way, The Spectacular may not exactly be billed as advertised (meaning it’s not, well, “spectacular”), but there’s stuff here that will make you think and that’s a good enough reason to warrant investing your time with the book. Rock on, sisters! This might be the novel that was meant for you!
Zoe Whittall’s The Spectacular will be published by HarperCollins Canada on August 24, 2021.
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Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
