I didn't get it. Seriously, I just spent 300 pages reading this book--and I didn't get it.
Seating Arrangements is about an upper-crust family meeting at their beach house to celebrate the wedding of their pregnant daughter. Lots of family members and friends show up and eat lobster. Except if the lobster is sick (I suspect the sick lobster was a metaphor that I didn't get.) The story centers primarily on the father of the bride, Winn.
Winn was raised to be *somebody*, so he joins the boy's club, marries a perfectly respectable woman, has children (although he admits he does not understand his daughters), and lusts after his daughter's friend.
The bride's sister has been dumped by her father's rival's son. She spends the weekend hooking up with someone else and dealing with a whale. (Again, a metaphor I don't think I fully understand, unless it was that the whale's rotting carcass was a metaphor for the rotting of these peoples' lives.) I did sense the "living lives of quiet desperation" theme, but that was just not enough to make me like this book.
The book seemed like a play with lots and lots of characters. Every few pages, one would come onto the page, say a few lines, exit, and another would enter, only to repeat the enterprise a few pages later. Oatsie, Winn, Sterling, Biddy, etc. just kept coming and going... (yes, those really are their names).
The whole book took place over a weekend, but it felt like it took 10 years for me to finish the book.
Seating Arrangements is about an upper-crust family meeting at their beach house to celebrate the wedding of their pregnant daughter. Lots of family members and friends show up and eat lobster. Except if the lobster is sick (I suspect the sick lobster was a metaphor that I didn't get.) The story centers primarily on the father of the bride, Winn.
Winn was raised to be *somebody*, so he joins the boy's club, marries a perfectly respectable woman, has children (although he admits he does not understand his daughters), and lusts after his daughter's friend.
The bride's sister has been dumped by her father's rival's son. She spends the weekend hooking up with someone else and dealing with a whale. (Again, a metaphor I don't think I fully understand, unless it was that the whale's rotting carcass was a metaphor for the rotting of these peoples' lives.) I did sense the "living lives of quiet desperation" theme, but that was just not enough to make me like this book.
The book seemed like a play with lots and lots of characters. Every few pages, one would come onto the page, say a few lines, exit, and another would enter, only to repeat the enterprise a few pages later. Oatsie, Winn, Sterling, Biddy, etc. just kept coming and going... (yes, those really are their names).
The whole book took place over a weekend, but it felt like it took 10 years for me to finish the book.
