Something Borrowed
author: Emily Giffin
name: Paul
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2004
rating: 3
read at: 2012/05/16
date added: 2012/05/16
shelves: novel
review:
Now and then I like to choose a book to read that maybe I wouldn’t usually try, just because it is one that means something to my wife. Her and I have pretty divergent tastes in a lot of things, but I would hope that if I found an amazing science fiction novel that I thought she might be able to enjoy, she would humor me and give it a shot. So likewise from time to time I ask her what book she would want me to read. Emily Giffin‘s Something Borrowed is, for the time being at least, among her very favorite books so when I asked which of her books she’d recommend, this is what she selected.
Something Borrowed follows Rachel, a straight-edge lawyer living in New York, and her best friend from childhood, Darcy. Darcy is a force of nature: beautiful, casually successful, engaged to a great guy and full of the self-confidence unique to the chosen few who seem to figure out early that life is a game and the deck is stacked. Next to Darcy, Rachel is mousy and doormat-ish, but like anyone who has ever had a self-absorbed friend, she accepts Darcy at face value. Then, on Rachel’s 30th birthday, she ends up alone with Darcy’s fiance, Dex, and they sleep together. At first, Rachel is horrified by her mistake, but as she timidly navigates the reconciliation with Dex, she finds that he wants more and she’s surprised to discover she does, too.
Eventually Dex and Rachel begin a full-fledged affair, fall in love and struggle with their twin betrayals of Darcy. The majority of the book is spent on this back-and-forth internal monologue where Rachel presents a series of anecdotes that gradually paint Darcy as a steamroller, an egotist, deceitful and more than a little petty. She struggles with her feelings for Dex, with her feelings for Darcy and faces some hard truths about herself in the way she lets herself get pushed around at work (in a job she hates, no less), the way she passively experiences life and the way she frames everything about herself against the backdrop that is Darcy.
The core of the book hinges on the following premise: make The Other Woman seem sympathetic and justified. To a certain degree this works, but I think perhaps not in the way Giffin intends. For one thing, the Darcy character, up until the end when Giffin pushes her so over the top to drive home the point, never really seems like she’s all that bad. Sure she’s self-obsessed and domineering, but those traits are also framed as if they’ve been present in her since elementary school so the negative impact they have on Rachel ends up feeling more like Rachel’s fault for not being honest about how that makes her feel more than justifications for betrayal. I suspect Rachel’s is supposed to be in self-discovery mode throughout the novel, but it really comes across more as if she’s discovering the truth about a friend she’s known for over twenty years. Perhaps this is intended to be revelatory but the effect to me was just to make Rachel look like an unobservant patsy.
Mostly it all feels very contrived, as if Giffin were trying her hardest to create this monstrous character in Darcy but constantly had to pull back to make it believable that this venomous wretch would actually have plural friends, or even singular friends. Meanwhile Rachel waffles and grovels and commiserates and acts flighty, never really seeming all that likable. It’s a strange sense because I don’t have a problem with protagonists who are flawed, complicated people and I don’t have a problem with antagonists who are less than pure evil, but where I struggled with the characterizations was in the way that I got a clear sense of what the author wanted me to think, but I simply couldn’t reconcile it with what I actually took from the way the narration presented them.
Granted, at the end Giffin stops splitting the middle and drops all the main players into neat little buckets which creates a pat ending to a novel that was, up until that point, happily complex. I think what I resent most about Something Borrowed is that I would have liked to read the book that was coming through the pages, but someone needed to tell Giffin that it’s okay to keep the point-of-view characters a little out of arm’s reach and to let the bad guys in books be mostly good. I would have enjoyed a story that didn’t always feel like it had to apologize for the bad behavior of the main character and had to add a twirl-ready mustache to the conflict sources. A more nuanced, more neutral approach to all the characters and their relationships would have made for a less clear cut but far more fascinating novel.
Still, I enjoyed Something Borrowed a lot more than I maybe expected to. This is a first novel so I was able to forgive a few of the rough edges like sketchy characterizations of some peripheral players and the persistent brand name dropping which I think is supposed to add an air of authenticity but comes across like product placement somehow. I do think that my wife’s suggestion that upon finishing this book I would be compelled to run out and read the follow-up, which I guess is told from Darcy’s point of view, called Something Blue, is not accurate. More than anything I think a book containing a bunch of snooty rich New Yorkers who (without irony) say they’re going to “summer” instead of “vacation” and who think the core of a person’s being can be defined by how they reacted to news of Princess Diana’s death is the kind of book I can tolerate once in a while, but not in a back-to-back kind of way. But, I won’t say that I’ll intentionally exclude Something Blue from my to-read list.