Today’s matchup includes a pair 
of very disparate books. Vinson Cunningham, a former Obama campaign worker turned New Yorker staff writer, wrote a novel that’s about his time on the Obama campaign without ever explicitly naming Obama or any of the other major figures in the campaign. Giving it the title Great Expectations certainly did nothing to set reasonable expectations of the novel, but even if there were, I didn’t really feel that there was all that much there there in this book.
Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland on the other hand takes its title from a discount beauty supplies store from the main character Adina’s childhood, with a barely functional mother who finds a fax machine and leaves it in her daughter’s bedroom only for the daughter to receive messages from aliens who claim to have sent her to earth on a reconaissance mission through the fax machine and sending her own reports back to them.
Are the aliens real or part of Adina’s imagination? The book doesn’t provide an answer to this question and instead uses it to provide insights into the life of a young woman in twenty-first century America and it ends up being a brilliant work of fiction. I got hooked from the start and never lost interest as it progressed and it was my choice to proceed.
My judgment on the judgment
I was far from surprised that Meher Manda’s judgment matched my own. The matchup is so unbalanced as to almost be unfair and while she is measured in her critique of Cunningham’s novel, it’s clear she feels the same.
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