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A review by serru
Adore by Doris Lessing
2.0
A novella about two female friends who enter into affairs with each other's teenage sons, and the story plays out fairly predictably, in my opinion. The way it is written is far less trashy than the taboo premise suggests, as it doesn't focus heavily on the romance or passion of the affairs as you might expect. The writing actually feels pretty distancing in that the plot moves quite fast with not much exploration of the characters' feelings. It's mostly just descriptions of the actions the characters take with some lines describing how they feel but it feels like I don't really get to go through all the emotions with them as a reader, I'm just sort of observing it all from afar. The beginning started pretty strong but once the affairs started, I felt like the writing devolved into paragraphs like 'This happens. And then this happens. And then this happens. Then the character felt this emotion. Then this other thing happens." Lots of clunky telling and not showing. Really, for me, the best writing is in the very first section of the book that takes places years in the future, when the women are grandmothers.
The most interesting part of the story for me is not the affairs themselves but the friendship between the two mothers and how intertwined their lives (and consequently, their sons' lives) are. I would have liked to see Lessing expand the story more to explore the friendship between the sons, how these relationships with each other's mothers affected the way they saw other women, etc. I just felt there was a lot of potential here for a more interesting story but it ended up being a pretty straightforward, predictable (and a little boring) tale of taboo.
Edit: Watched the movie, I think it handles all the relationships a little better, has far more emotional depth, and makes it more obvious just how enmeshed the four of them are. It's better than the book but I wouldn't call it a great movie either.
The most interesting part of the story for me is not the affairs themselves but the friendship between the two mothers and how intertwined their lives (and consequently, their sons' lives) are. I would have liked to see Lessing expand the story more to explore the friendship between the sons, how these relationships with each other's mothers affected the way they saw other women, etc. I just felt there was a lot of potential here for a more interesting story but it ended up being a pretty straightforward, predictable (and a little boring) tale of taboo.
Edit: Watched the movie, I think it handles all the relationships a little better, has far more emotional depth, and makes it more obvious just how enmeshed the four of them are. It's better than the book but I wouldn't call it a great movie either.