Sheri's Reviews > Lost for Words

So this is probably a 3.5; there were a few funny moments, but the super meta and satirical "inside literary establishment" trope feels too overdone to me to be a full 4 stars.

St. Aubyn himself does a great job of showing the importance of words (even if the book is lost for words) with his (one has to assume deliberate) over-writing of stereotypical characters and random book passages. The schtick if you will is the political relationships among the various authors and literary figures on the committee for the elite Elysian prize, but it also feels like St. Aubyn had a bunch of story ideas and wanted to illustrate them. One wonders if the book would have been more interesting as a collection of short stories that had longer passages from all these "short list" books. Alas, instead we just get odd (but funny) passages sprinkled throughout. Anyway, my point is that St. Aubyn does create different voices for all of these fictional novels, mostly with such varied word choice.

As an odd, random aside I found Vanessa's inability to have a free afternoon and her need to schedule/fill/and constantly be doing to be funny and very personally relevant. Specifically: "the strain of leaving her afternoon empty" because her "judgemental mind" characterizes it "as mere laziness" to be something with which I personally struggle.

Overall it was an entertaining and page turning kind of read with some funny comments (like, "Personally I think that competition should be encouraged in war and sport and business, but that it makes no sense in the arts. If an artist is good, nobody else can do what he or she does and therefore all comparisons are incoherent. Only the mediocre, pushing forward a commonplace view of life in a commonplace language, can really be compared"), but nothing spectacular and not overly original.