The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

I knew I wanted to read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society because of Anna's enthusiastic review at Diary of An Eccentric and the other positive reviews I've noted over the past year or so (Bermuda Onion, Caribous Mom, Farm Lane Books). So when a friend who said she liked it offered to lend it to me recently, I decided to read it next. Perhaps my expectations were too high. I found it enjoyable, and certainly a fast read, but I was disappointed that the characters weren't better developed and that the book discussions were a fairly shallow and peripheral part of the novel.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is an epistolary novel, so character development can be tricky, but it's often one of the most enjoyable aspects of the genre. Here, I was left wondering why on earth the main character, Juliet, likes a four-year-old girl she's just met well enough to take care of her almost exclusively within days of their meeting, and why the girl's other caretakers allow it. The letters suggest that the other caretakers already "love" Juliet before they meet her, from reading her letters, but I would need more than a few month's worth of letters before I handed over any four-year-old in my care.

I was also unsatisfied with the descriptions of Juliet's laconic true love, Dawsey, a man that her best friend describes as "quiet, capable, trustworthy--oh Lord, I've made him sound like a dog--and he has a sense of humor." The thing is, I thought he continued to sound like a dog right to the end of the novel, if a dog could have a sense of humor and a love for reading Charles Lamb.

One of the most quoted sentences from the novel comes from one of the best-delineated characters, Isola, who says "I don't believe that after reading such a fine writer as Emily Bronte, I will be happy to read again Miss Amanda Gillyflower's Ill-Used by Candlelight. Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books." That last sentence is a good one, all right, but much of its charm stems from the particularity of the detail in the preceding sentence. This novel would be much better if all its observations on reading were similarly particularized. One character says he loves reading Seneca, but if a love of Seneca is to be communicated to the novel's readers, there should be some more specific reasons than just that the character has lived through wartime.

Being not entirely immune to this novel's charms, however, I very much enjoyed the story of how Granny Pheen came to have a series of letters written by none other than Oscar Wilde. Any novel that worships Wilde as much as this one does is a friend of mine. Just not a very good friend. Not the kind that lets you get too close.

I occasionally find other novels similarly frustrating, in that I feel I'd like to know the characters better, including finding out what they value in the books they say they love--I got the same kind of feeling reading Fowler's The Jane Austen book club, and a bit of it reading Setterfield's The Thirteenth Tale. Maybe it's just that I wouldn't be a good fit for most book clubs--and that's why I've never joined one. If you have, are you satisfied with the level of discussion?