Where I’m reminded expectations can kill

Ten years ago, I was preparing for summer calculus courses to fulfill prerequisites for graduate programs in biostatistics. Good times. I ended up getting in to a top (and very expensive) masters program on the east coast, and then I lasted two weeks into the second quarter before admitting I’d made a terrible mistake, packing my few possessions into a rental car, and driving myself back across the country to an unfamiliar Sacramento apartment my partner had rented after moving north from Los Angeles to start a new job at the University of California at Davis. Not wanting to feel like I’d wasted all that time and money, I applied for and was admitted to a grad program in epidemiology at Davis, and I started working for my future advisor to get a jump on my research. I spent a lot of time in Davis that spring and summer, and although I never ended up actually going to grad school (a long, boring story better suited to a psychiatrist’s office), I have a lot of affection for the town and the university.

Karen Joy Fowler set much of her novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves in and around UC Davis, and since I’m a sucker for a familiar setting, I raced through this book in just a few days. It reads like a memoir by the main character, Rosemary, who follows her father’s advice and starts in the middle of her story by telling about the time she was inadvertently arrested in the college cafeteria, guilty by proximity to the crazy antics of another student, Harlow, a drama major and major drama queen who would become one of Rosemary’s closest friends. We then follow her back to childhood, where she works through her own cloudy memories of the family secrets that drove her to college in Davis, far from her childhood home of Bloomington, Indiana. 

To say much more would be to say too much. The big “twist” comes fairly early, and it’s telegraphed enough that many readers probably will have already figured it out. I’ll admit that I hadn’t guessed by the time I got there, and when the reveal comes, it’s so clunky that the moment loses its power, like when you’re walking along and trip and then try to save face by jogging for a few strides as if that’s what you meant to do.

This book reminded me of those times on Top Chef or Project Runway when the judges say there are too many ideas. I can hear Heidi Klum saying, “With something like this, I don’t know where I’m supposed to look.” Some of the ideas here work better than others. Most effective is the examination of memory itself, how memories are made, how they’re recalled, and how they’re pieced together by our brains at different points in our lives. I’ve been thinking a lot about these concepts lately, and I thought Fowler handled them thoughtfully. She also captures what it’s like to be a kid, from the alienness of new experiences like going through an automatic carwash to the alienation of being a weirdo at school at the same time the family is falling apart at home. 

She also delivered one of my favorite lines ever: “. . . so outgoing she was practically incoming.” I literally laughed out loud. Mad respect for that kind of wordplay.

On the downside, though, the family drama never really came together for me, as I never learned enough about the other family members to understand their motivations or even really care about them. The political stuff seemed more like propaganda in this setting, more like additives wedged in by a bureaucrat than a necessary part of an organic whole. And the memoir style itself gave the story arc an odd shape: there’s no true climax, and the promise of the first half is never paid off. The last several chapters reminded me of why I rarely read memoirs. There’s a lot of information, a lot of straight-forward cataloging of facts and milestones, but not much story and very little drama. 

In the end this book was sunk by my own false expectations. I knew it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, so I expected a certain type of book (and understand that makes me a certain type of snob). This book didn’t fit that image, but if I forget the weight of my expectations, I realize I had a read that was enjoyable enough: gentle, sentimental, and light-hearted with some solid laughs. I prefer a little more bite in my literary fiction, but I think plenty of people will like this book for what it is.