Scarlett Johansson Books

If I would have wasted my money buying this book I would have been very sad. Few times have I ever given up on a book, but I did this time. I made it more than half way through and I just couldn't take anymore. It was a punishing read.

I kept wanting so much more out of this novel. As I read, I awaited the climax, the revelations, something that would make the novel and its' characters more likeable. I yearned for insight into how a woman copes with the loss of her lover's functioning and into how a couple handles this emotional trauma. And so, eventually, Carrie had grown on me and I grew to understand Mike, the quadriplegic, a bit better, and their relationship was given consideration and explanation. However, this did not occur until the end of the book. The last chapters were my favorites. Thankfully, I did not put down the novel before then as I as tempted to do.

Ann Packer is a wonderful writer in many ways--fine, well-tuned dialogue, thought-provoking descriptions of people's motives, and so on--but plot isn't her big talent. As interesting as the idea for "The Dive from Clausen's Pier" is--woman leaves her fiance after he breaks his neck and becomes a quadriplegic--Packer can't quite pull it off.

Carrie Bell has been having major second thoughts about her engagement to Mike Mayer, but has been lazily trying to anticipate what will happen rather than actively discussing her fears and worries with Mike. She makes no move to communicate or take action, so when he suddenly becomes an invalid, she feels trapped. She flees from their hometown of Madison, Wisconsin to New York where--conveniently--she rooms for free with a high school acquaintance, seems to exist on absolutely zero money (laughable for anyone who's ever even visited NYC, much less lived there), and spends a lot of time a) moping, b) sewing, and c) having sex with a new love interest. The new love interest is less open and available than Mike ever was (and has the improbable and annoying name of Kilroy), so of course he's very interesting to Carrie. Too bad he's not interesting to the reader--he's just annoying and pretentious.

Packer makes sure Kilroy has some mysterious past that he won't share with Carrie, but when he finally spills the beans, his big secret seems both inorganic and forced. When Carrie finally returns to Madison and tries to begin a new life in which Mike is just her friend, the story becomes believable again, even though Mike seems too tidily accepting of his terrible fate a mere year after the accident.

Packer really is a skilled writer in so many ways--see above--but the plot seemed to me to be simultaneously overly busy and really draggy. I felt like she would have benefited from some surgical editing--the book would have moved more briskly and been less flabby had her editor seen fit to cut 50 to 100 pages from its 400+ pages.

I had heard and read rave reviews about this award winning, best-selling novel. I was doing a review on her latest book, "Songs Without Words", and decided to read "Clausen's Pier" to see if it would give me a better perspective on Packer's writing style. Actually, I thought this book was less interesting than her newer one, if that's possible. Packer's grammar is atrocious, her vocabulary is questionable, and her sexual "interludes" are strangely discomforting and misogynistic. The female protagonists seem to become involved with only childish, self-centered, emotionally stunted men, which is certainly not inspiring, and seem to have little ability to manage the rest of their lives or relationships. In both her books I have found the supporting characters to be far more interesting and successfully developed than the so-called protagonists. Perhaps the "moral" of Packer's stories is to look beyond the superficial to the supporting roles for those with heroic qualities. The problem is that the poor reader has to slog through such a mess to find them!

Carrie and Mike, they were a pair ever since she was thirteen. Then, after college, what everyone had expected for just about forever, they were engaged. But Carrie was having doubts about this steady, comfortable relationship, and Mike knew it. He was worried that Memorial Day when they went picnicking with friends at Clausen's Pier. He dove into the water, and their lives were changed forever.

The Dive from Clausen's Pier is Carrie's story, the story of how she struggles to be true to herself knowing what all but her mother think when she flees to New York just as Mike is reconciling himself to a life of paralysis. Ann Packer asks through Carrie, "How much do we owe the people we love?" Where in the scale of living does loyalty lie? Throughout Carrie's turmoil, her mom is there, supporting her in her doubts and decisions. And as Carrie moves into being her own self, so she leads the reader.

Packer carries the reader intimately into the scene. Almost all the Madison places she described evoked memory after memory for me from the nine years I, too, lived there. I imagine that her New York scenes were equally accurate and detailed. But one does not need to have been there because Packer makes the emotions, the changes, the places so very real.

A thoughtful, emotional work of art.

by Judith Helburn
for StorycircleBookReviews
www.storycirclebookreviews.org
reviewing books by, for, and about women