I can’t seem to find a good book to read lately. I’ve recently finished How The Light Gets In, by M.J. Hyland, lured by (a) it being different than my usual fare, (b) Hyland winning a Distinguished New Author award for it and (c) the jacket reference to “Holden Caulfield, with whom she invites inevitable comparison”. How The Light Gets In is ostensibly the story of a lower-class Australian girl whose high marks at school earn her a scholarship to an exchange program in America, where she lives just outside Chicago with a picture-perfect family whose veneer hides dysfunctions of their own. It sounded quite interesting to me.

In all fairness, I must state that it is very hard for me to like or report favorably upon a book if I can’t relate or somehow empathize with the main character. The main character could be a transvestite pirate from the year 2525 in a science fiction epic, but if he’s got a warped and twisted sense of humour (and how could he not?), I’ll probably like him. But the main character here, Lou(ise), is distinctly unlikeable and, for someone whose intelligence is supposed to have earned her this berth, irretrievably stupid.

At first Lou provides rather astute and often comic observations but she becomes annoying very quickly. One of the most glaring examples is that while she goes on and on about her insomnia and its ill effects on her health and life, she sleeps All. The. Damn. Time. She sleeps when she’s supposed to be doing things with her host family, she sleeps in other peoples’ beds, she sleeps all night and half the day. No wonder Henry (father of her host family) is perplexed when she suggests she needs to see a physician for her insomnia - she’s been awake and ambulatory all of six hours straight in the 2 months since her plane landed.

Another facet of Lou’s character that was annoying in itself, but also because it didn’t ring true for me as written, was that she’s supposed to be very intelligent and indeed is smart enough to realize what a chance this is for her future success (and goes on and on and on about it ad nauseam) yet she sabotages her “big chance” at every opportunity. I don’t buy the self-sabotage as an outlet of teenage angst, because it doesn’t fit the character that we’re told has managed to excel scholastically amid the raucous, delinquent chain-smoking household she left in Australia; it simply doesn’t follow that she caves under these new “pressures”.

And what pressures, exactly? Lou’s host family is described as outwardly perfect yet inwardly dysfunctional. Hmpf, I didn’t see anything so dysfunctional about them myself. They expect the same good manners and proper behavior from Lou as from their own children and have problems coming to terms with this as an unreasonable expectation, they are surprised when Lou, chronologically older than their children and far more mature, exhibits signs of teenage rebellion they have hitherto not experienced and so they’re not sure how to handle it but I don’t see how that makes them dysfunctional or evil or cruel. The host parents don’t want their 16 year old exchange student to smoke cigarettes or get drunk, and expect her to observe a curfew on school nights - the horror. It’s hard to feel any sympathy for Lou or her put-upon poor-little-me attitude when they get angry after discovering that she’s stolen money from her host mother’s purse. I’d be pretty pissed off, too.

Don’t even get me started on the most tacked-on, unlikely, ridiculous piece of crap ending in modern literature (whichever way you interpret it, and it’s very openness is part of what makes it so annoying).

A female Holden Caulfield? Not bloody likely unless I disremember and Holden was a whiny, bipolar, dipsomaniac thief instead of the witty, rather cynical fellow that I recall, who does not suffer phonies and loves his little sister. Quite frankly, Holden would have pushed Lou off the cliff.

And I’d have laughed.