A tale of OUR TIME
THIS GENDER-FLIPPING NOVEL ASKS THE QUESTION: WHAT IF I HAD BEEN BORN A MAN?
This novel is definitely a child of the #MeToo movement. It has a very strong message about gender, and in a way that is both its strength and its weakness.
The story is told in a Sliding Doors- style with two distinct versions. In one, Peggy Adler gives birth to a daughter called Louise. In the other, she gives birth to a son, Louis. The two versions of the same person have the same family and friends, similar appearance and dreams, and grow up in the same mill town in Maine.
But that one big difference – their gender – influences how their lives unfold.
Told from their alternate points of view, the novel highlights how differently Louis and Louise are treated from the outset by everyone around them. Then we fast-forward to meet them as adults. Louise is a teacher and a solo mum while Louis is a writer.
Both are called back home by an illness in the family, and both have to face up to a traumatic incident on graduation night that defined their lives in many ways, although how it played out varied depending on – yes, you guessed it – their gender.
This has the potential to be confusing, but the author structures the story so skilfully that it never is. My main issue with Louis & Louise was that
I felt uninvolved in the lives of the characters as their gender flipped back and forth. It was as if I was viewing them from a distance rather than getting properly caught up in their experiences.
So while the novel is clever, and I was intrigued and impressed, I didn’t love it as much as I did Julie Cohen’s last book, Together. That also had a tricky structure – it was told backwards – but it swept the reader into the story completely.
Not that I want to put you off reading Louis & Louise. It’s an ideal book-club choice as it’s so thought-provoking.
And it is original, smartly written and very much a novel of the moment, capturing so much of what we are thinking and talking about these days.