A Taxonomy of Barnacles: A Novel [Paperback]

I'm not a great writer, but in college I took some creative writing classes. In the classes, everybody had to read everybody else's stuff each week. Most of it was drivel, mine included. Aside from sharing a common thread of sheer awfulness, the writing also shared an affected fussiness. we all wrote like we thought we should write, or how our favourite author wrote. in the process, nothing we produced made sense, sounded real, or was very interesting at all.

you probably see where i'm going with this. i gave Taxonomy 50 pages. Facing another 300+, I kept asking myself, can it really be this bad? can the tone be this self-consciously pretentious, the sentences this schizophrenic, the diction this...plain wrong? Did anyone edit this book? did the author herself read her own writing? did she, in fact, pass 3rd grade?

doubting myself a little, and looking for a little confirmation, i sought any review i could find. On the New York Observer's website, author Anna Shapiro hits the mark dead on. I won't post her comments here, but please read her review before you consider buying this book.

http://www.observer.com/culture_books5.asp

I hate posting negative reviews, but I can honestly say Taxonomy goes down as the single worst effort by a first-time novelist that i've ever read.

"A Taxonomy of Barnacles" is supposedly a novel about nature versus nurture, taking its name from an early work of Darwin, and posing, in the background, the question of why Darwin, having developed his theory of natural selection in a study of barnacles, waited many years to publish it, and then focused instead on finches.

Thus, we have the contrast between the Barnacle family, a wealthy Jewish family whose patriarch made his money in pantyhose, and the Finch family, their WASPish neighbors who include a pair of identical twins. The book's introduction is well-written and intriguing, but from the start of the first actual chapter the book seems to have lost its way. Everyone in the Barnacle family has a first name starting with B, except for adopted Latrell, and they are hard to keep track of. Bell and Bridget and youngest Benita are pretty distinct, while the other three often go unmentioned for many pages. Bits and pieces are worthwhile, but the time scale is hard to follow, with some things seeming to go on forever while the book turns out to take place within a single week.

The supposed engine of the plot is a King Lear like promise by father Barry Barnacle to leave his fortune to the daughter who immortalizes the family name. Motifs of the importance of the right proposal (which I assume is the point other reviewers refer to as a shout out to Jane Austen), the similarities and differences between twins and siblings, infidelity, deception and identity switching fill the book.

Unfortunately, what does not fill the book is any sense of consistency.

The author can't make up her mind as to how identical the Finch twins actually are, just like she can't make up her mind as to whether Bella, the mother, breaks her leg (a plot point that just lies there) or it is merely a sprain. Within two paragraphs, Latrell has two different favorite places to hide (many of which are pretty hard to imagine actually working in 2006 in New York, such as hanging at the Guggenheim amongst the art after hours; does she think there are no motion detectors or cameras?). Yankee players have made up names; David Wells pitches for the Red Sox. Her basic understanding of baseball, despite the fact that it is mentioned over and over again, seems at about the level of the average American's understanding of English County Cricket. New Yorkers are not divided between fans of the Yankees and Red Sox, they are divided between fans of the Yankees and Mets. A grand slam in the bottom of the ninth when the team is four runs behind ties the game; it is not over.

Perhaps the strangest bit, though, is at the very beginning. Bridget's erstwhile boyfriend Trot, on whom she has been cheating in her heart with Billy Finch, is chided by her for having failed to bring cake to the family's Seder. He, not Jewish, failed to do so for the obvious reason that no one should bring cake to a ceremony where only unleavened bread is to be consumed.

I did laugh out loud at her making fun of my own surname on page 166. And at a few other points, which is why it rates two stars, not one. Benita is kind of fun and Beryl is rather sweet. Others have compared it to the Royal Tenenbaums (which I hated), but I think the sense of unreality and privilege comes more from Francis Ford Coppola's "Life Without Zoe", his generally unsuccessful contribution to "New York Stories". It too is a fantasy about privileged people that seems to assume that we should care about them, without going to the effort to provide us a reason why we should care.

I had to force myself to finish this book. Now that I am finished, I couldn't even begin to tell you what it's about other than an annoying family. It jumps all over the place and it's difficult to keep all of the sisters in order. Like others, I don't know how this book made it to print. I also found the constant use of the word "ennui" irritating. If you insist on reading this, don't buy it, get it from the library. It's not worth the money.

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 34 reviews  3.0 out of 5 stars