Josephine Hart's "Sin" was the most inconsistent and frustrating book I've read in a long time. Brilliantly spare and concise, Hart's prose was (at times) surprisingly good. She drops these perfect little phrases throughout the text but she won't let them lie! For lack of a better term, she doesn't "leave the power with the punch." I found myself wanting to smack her and yell "WHY?! Why did you keep going? Leave it alone. If was perfect the way it was." The text becomes an aggravating pattern of tiny explosive phrases intermixed with these purple prose-y unnecessary expository crap.
But while the writer-me was gritting my teeth through page after frustrating page, the therapist-me was wiggling with excitement at the best literary depiction of antisocial personality disorder I have ever read. In Ruth, Hart has created character that is both relatable and completely alien. The reader identifies with her jealousy, her rage, her desire to destroy the epitome of what she is not and can not have. But her nearly complete lack of empathy and feeling towards her "family" is disturbing and, to most people, hopelessly depressing.
From a clinical point of view Hart's novel is nearly perfect. From a literary point of view (and one must necessarily judge all fiction from this point of view) Hart's novel fails. Not miserably but it still fails.
It's not successful.
At all.
[Yeah, I did that on purpose.]
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