Awkward self-help fiction
Your Second Life Begins When You Realize You Only Have One ,by Raphaelle Giordano, Penguin Random House NZ, $37. Reviewed by Felicity Price.
There is some promise in the concept for this debut novel by Raphaelle Giordano: a bored 38-year-old mother of a busy, 9-year-old boy, who still loves her husband, but is finding married life a bit, well, routine.
One dark and stormy night, driving through the woods on the outskirts of Paris, her car tyre blows and, with no traffic around, she has to walk to the nearest shelter to call a cab.
It could be the start of Rocky Horror, or a genuinely scary thriller. But no such luck: it’s not as compelling as that.
The house she reaches first belongs to a wealthy, handsome man, apparently resembling a ‘‘Gallic Sean Connery’’. No sooner is our heroine, Camille, dried off and settled down with a cuppa than she pours out her boredom to our Gallic hero and, hey presto, he tells her he can fix all her problems because he’s a ‘‘routineologist’’. His job is to bring Parisians back from the brink of boredom and return their joie de vivre.
Camille leaves with his card and deliberates whether to get back in touch with hunky Claude. The little problems at home are magnified: her son gets cranky and difficult, her husband takes her for granted, and she realises her routine office job is the one her mother wanted her to do, not the creative dream Camille had for herself.
So she makes an appointment with Claude, whose fee he tells her is as much as she feels he is worth paying. And that’s where – at approximately page 30 – the novel turns to custard. What follows is a to-do list for positive thinking, an Eat, Pray, Love without much of a story, very little conflict to whet our appetite, and characters that are as thin as cardboard.
Its whole purpose, it seems, is to coach the reader to be their better self, a manual in the pseudo-science of neurolinguistic programming. Wade through the long to-do lists, develop further long lists of plans, and we will be able to reprogramme ourselves so we can live our lives positively and with self-confidence. But there are way too many lists, and even a glossary of actions to follow, and it’s all just a bit much for a purported work of fiction.
Pitched as ‘‘the novel that has already made two million readers happier’’, it has a veritable United Nations of reviewers on Goodreads. But if their responses are anything to go by, they’re by no means all happy. Never have I seen quite such varied ratings. Some people give it five stars, some one, some in between. For me, its cloying, preachy style was only just worthy of a one: awkward title, awkward book.
The book’s whole purpose is to coach the reader to be their better self, a manual in the pseudo-science of neurolinguistic programming.