The Privileges

You come up from nothing, make your fortune, alienate your friends, pamper, and ultimately destroy your children; they call it living the American dream!

The Privileges by Jonathan Dee describes such a life recreated in nauseating detail. According to Jonathan Franzen it was "Cunning, seductive…delicious page by page." The New York Times came up with "Articulate and perceptive…full of elegance, vitality and complexity", and Jay McInerney rooted around in his bag of tricks to declare, "The tour de force first chapter alone is worth the price of admission". Well, what a load of baloney. For what it’s worth if I were asked I’d say, quite simply, I hated this book. Its sadly drawn characters were people you’d never want to meet, who had no core values, no inner soul, no empathy or understanding, they were desperate and selfish and downright unkind. There was nothing illuminating or particularly creative about this novel and yet I read it right to the very end (I was on holiday and it had come highly recommended), an ending, I might add, that was unrewarding, and would have been disappointing had it anything to offer in the first place.

Perhaps you’ll love it. Perhaps it will win prizes and create a stir in literary circles. Perhaps, this, my first bad review, will sink without a trace in Blogland. So be it.