I received an advance copy of this book from the publisher. This has not influenced my review.
Blue Hours is a book in three parts. It is part relationship drama, part international hostage drama, and part infuriating.
The story begins in New York City with Mim, a recent college graduate trying to make it as a writer. She lives with several roommates and works in a retail clothing store. She is both too frugal to eat anything but liverwurst at the deli for lunch everyday and too frivolous to think about making her own sandwiches. Mim meets a man at a train station who invites her to a party that changes her life. At the party she meets Jack, a wealthy doctorate student that she quickly begins dating. She also meets Kyra, a wealthy dancer. Somewhere along the road she also meets Carl, a non-wealthy construction worker who served in the first Gulf War. This first part of the book spends 97 pages setting up the main romantic relationship of the book, which then takes less than two months (or 13 pages) to dissolve.
Part two begins twenty years later- Kyra has gone missing from her position in an aid group in Afghanistan and has had the forethought to send years’ worth of letters to her ex-husband, Roy. The letters are not addressed to Roy, though; they are addressed to Mim. Roy reaches out to her and the two of them decide that they need to go to Afghanistan to find Kyra. I think of this part as the “Incurious American traveler” part of the book.
And the third part, the epilogue, is what I desperately need to talk to someone about: was all of the worst of this book done purposely?
I am not one to write in books. I am not one to dog-ear pages. But Blue Hours? I ran out of paper to take notes on, and suddenly became a page-folding, margin-jotting maniac.
Mim is a blank slate- she is described very little, and the only way of knowing her is to infer a personality based on the assumptions she herself makes about every other character. And she assumes A LOT. Characters are repeatedly described as having flat stares, but from this Mim assumes all sorts of thoughts, motivations, next moves. A character with a tremor is, to Mim, obviously a veteran rather than a possible drunk. She has a number of oddly specific true-isms that are, quite frankly, bizarre- and not really true. And though I understand that part of the story takes place twenty years ago, it is disconcerting that Mim is shocked- shocked!- to find out that her dark-skinned boyfriend is half black. She does not find this out by her own powers of perception, or by having had any conversation about his family or upbringing because it would require her to look beyond herself. Her roommate has to tell her.
Also, Mim has somehow only encountered two fat people by the age of twenty-two. And one of them she has never spoken with, but has nicknamed ‘Profiterole’.
I spent the entire book wondering what the purpose was of having such an unreliable narrator- and then the last page may have justified it. But I am not completely convinced that this was done purposely.
I think that the story is an interesting one. The second part dragged on- rather than being a page-turning thriller (which I think was the intent) it was a slog to get through so many descriptions of Mim putting on a headscarf and then taking it off, or getting worried about being conspicuous but then complaining at length about wearing a burqa to become inconspicuous. But the bones of the story are good and the author beautifully describes the settings, whether a shared apartment in New York, a farm house in the Berkshires or a cave in Afghanistan.
Another thing well-done: Mim is a sobering portrait of a selfish and arrogant American. She assumes the worst of everyone, decides that her impulsive wants are more important than the needs of her husband and child, and goes to a foreign country that she repeatedly admits to knowing very little about and assumes that she knows more about hostage-finding, checkpoint rules, and Afghan village social norms than the people who live in that country.
I have so many thoughts on this book, so many thoughts about Mim, that I have doubled the word-count of this novel with margin notes. Notes like, “Ugh”, “Ugh x2”, “unfailingly superior to everyone else”, and “squeegee fight + promiscuity = must have been molested?” as well as the 5+ times I wrote the phrase “Mary Sue,” once with the addition of “AND A PROPHETESS?” At one point I researched how debit cards are used on websites (even though I know it) because it was pertinent and I started to think that Mim is not only unreliable but pathological.
Blue Hours will be released July 15, 2019. Please, someone, read this book so I can compare my crazy-person scribblings with another human.