My parents aren't the friendly type. Part of it is natural reticence. A much larger chunk of it is the fact that, when they moved 2000 miles to the west, they came expecting a fully formed enclave of fellow whites just waiting for another intrepid/well to do/kids in the dehumanizing rat race pair of folks to incorporate into yearly rituals involving passive aggressive one-up-manship, flavorless cooking, and a subtle bemoaning that the institution of slavery ever (seemingly) came to an end. Instead, they got a bevy of non-white engineers recruited from East/Southeast/South Asia, and, being rich enough to pay the mortgage but not enough to join their comrades in errant white flight, they had to stay put and slowly turn on everyone trapped in with them rather than risk humane contact with the parents of their children's friends (and found families). So, while reading this, I saw the ageism, isolation, and rightful fear of injury and thought, ok, that makes sense. However, I also paid heed to the not insignificant number of references to the glory days of imperialism, as well as how such past training must have proved splendidly useful for "cowing the natives" (as the book goes on) but horribly when it came to relations with everyone from perfectly considerate strangers to one's own children. In fact, if it weren't for the severe disparity between the economic well being of a certain pair of characters who, in another life and/or type of writing, would have consisted of a gigolo and their current sugar geriatric, this piece would have been unbearably pointless: not because not much happened, but due to the "stiff upper lip" that allows for elitist snubs, dirty jokes, and homage to the ruling class, but forbids nearly anything in the way of actual communication. Sure, I'm not going to confuse Taylor with any part of any of her characters, but having grown up during the days that inevitably cause the indifferent descendants and the cold blooded monetary transactions in place of family relations, I'm also not going enjoy it.

Life sucks and then you die. Sure, if you live in a land where it's more feasible to deal drugs than to build up a union when it comes to paying off hospital bills, kids go to med school so as to make money and lord over others rather than actually help folks live a better life, and the adage of moving out at eighteen has more to do with maximizing the profits of real estate, landlords, and insurance companies than it does with any sort of healthy society. I'm not going to expect every piece of fiction that ever deals with a capitalistic society to tackle the elephant in the room, but if there's not much else going on and so much of the moaning and groaning could be resolved with a small amount of collective action or at least a spoonful of general goodwill, there's a limit to how much I'm going to put up with reading about a bunch of sad sops who can afford to live in one of the ritziest (and least razeable to the ground according to world politics) areas on earth and yet can't manage to rummage up enough capital, social and otherwise, for a board game or two. There was some charm or two here and there, but it had the quality of a coffee shop romance: the barista is friendly and is the highlight of your day (perhaps even your week, or month), but nine times out of ten, you're part of their grind to afford a small amount of space in an apartment meant for two and stretched out to six, and that romance you're conjuring up is little more than stalking and sexual harassment. I would've felt different if there had been even one instance of one of the senior citizens ignoring their training and indulging in a community of themselves that was built on something like a dialectic rather than alcohol or coercive amatonormativity, but seemed like the most positive narrative instances centered around one or more of them tut tutting and drawing themselves back into their uppity shells, sometimes even to the detriment of their health. It certainly paints a portrait of what can happen, but as I've discussed, sympathy has its limits, and contrary to popular belief, tragedy is not automatically more literary than comedy.

Taylor's one of those rather prolific authors who I've come across on many a list for reading women, award winners, or both, so the fact that this particular piece, arguably her most popular and/or well received, didn't jive with me is rather unfortunate, seeing as how I now have little interest in pursuing the rest of her bibliography. I simply just have a hard time not stripping down a book on a materialist level if there's not much else going for it, and if you counted up the total number of instances one or more characters made a decision and then considered what percentage of those, for all its tactfully unspoken nature, revolved solely around money, you'd get a number that made the acrid social interactions and dismal family situations even more mournfully dull. A popular assurance is that I'll feel differently (aka fall a lot more in line) when I myself am off the senior age, but in all honesty, if my parents had had their full say in the manner, I'd never survive for that long. All in all, as I've said rather unfortunately frequently during the course of 2022, not the best way for a work that's been waiting on my shelves for the last decade to go out. However, know thyself and all that, so I'll simply have to put it in my pile for selling to Half Price Books and pass it along to some other fellow sufferer of the VMC itch. It's a rather inoffensive piece that has some good things to say about a particular singularly vulnerable set of folks, but it's not for me.