Inventing the Abbotts [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Having very much enjoyed the film version of "Inventing the Abbots", starring Joaquin Phoenix, Liv Tyler, and Billy Crudup, I was intrigued by this collection of short stories by Sue Miller, an author who was foreign to me up until this point. I purchased the book in the hopes that these stories would be absorbing and entertaining as the movie I'd seen. Inventing the Abbots, I've found, makes just as good of a story as it does a film. I cannot tell you which version I prefer, because they both tackle the same premise in completely different ways. Both involve two brothers from a poor family and their love/hate relationships with the Abbot sisters-- the daughters of one of the wealthier men in town. While the movie beefs up the role of the narrator/younger brother and makes love (mainly the tortured type) a central theme, the literary work is more focused on the resentment and anger that can come with the youth, and the releasing of that hostility that can come with growing up. Both interpretations are interesting takes on a basic, uncomplicated storyline. The stories that followed failed to be even half as good as "Inventing the Abbots". While Miller's ability to characterize and set a scene is incredible, the actual content, the PLOT, of her works were... uninteresting. Had her pieces been, say, five pages, it would have been fine. But, her stories were usually ten, fifteen, even twenty pages... sometimes more. My feeling was that if she insisted on writing such long stories, she should establish a more solid conflict. All of the characters in her stories were hurting, they were vulnerable, they were REAL, but they were also boring. My other complaint was that with every story, it looked as though she was going to define a message, a POINT, but she copped out at the end of each work. "Inventing the Abbots" was about mistakes made during one's youth, it was about anger that can only be soothed by time. I honestly can't tell you what the other stories were about-- I found myself drilling my brain, trying to figure out what she was trying to teach me. Maybe I'm wrong. I am, after all, too young to identify with many of the situations she sets up. A lot of her works in this collection deal with middle-aged women and men who are coping with broken hearts and children they can't connect with. "Inventing the Abbots" is the only story that is about young people-- and when I say young, I mean college age, I don't mean junior high. So, I'm not condemning the writer, I'm saying these works didn't do anything for me. I'll be incredibly interested to see if anyone else has an opinion about this book, but to anyone who sees this review and this one alone, I will leave you with this:

She is, no question, an amazingly talented author, but her short stories, except for "Inventing the Abbots" (which is REALLY good), left something to be desired in my own mind because, frankly, nothing happened and I didn't understand any of the symbolism, if there was any... I'm not sure.