Vintage Attraction
by Charles Blackstone
Pegasus Books, 2013
304 pages / $24.95 buy from Pegasus Books or Amazon
1. Charles Blackstone is the managing editor of Bookslut, which is a nice outfit with a long-standing thing going on and you can read them at: www.bookslut.com
2. I prefer to call him Charlie and he is fine with that.
3. This novel is about a guy who is in love with a famous girl in Chicago who is a wine expert and has her own restaurant thing going on and her own tv show and the guy contacts her as a fan and then they elope and then five weeks later he thinks she is cheating on him and also they aren’t even getting along really and then they are taking a trip to Greece together.
4. There isn’t any gore or devastating kind of art going on in it what it is instead is more of a vibe of like you’re on a second date with someone you really like and it’s a picnic and you just want to seem really nice because you actually think your date is really nice so you use proper grammar. Don’t even lie you know you look really cute when you dress up sometimes. I want to say this book has a tone you’d use in a job interview but that wouldn’t be helping anyone.
5. Also our narrator has an incredibly sad type of way about him which I am basically a complete sucker for but that is fine.
6. This guy in the novel is an adjunct professor.
7. It has this kind of little nervous guy thrown into a big city feel to it because he like asks this girl out and then they’re married and he has to keep up with her life.
8. Have you ever felt like you had to keep up with someone and was it exhausting.
9. I think this entire novel may be a metaphor for the history of wine. Tolstoy.
10. They’re running around Greece trying to either fix or break a marriage they’ve been in for five weeks.
11. The really smart part working within the novel has to do with character intent. We have a need to dominate but flipped in gender roles going on. Kafka. And an internal narrative/intent/perspective is totally not the real of what is going on here going on ie this guy just wants what he wants and is not getting it. Dostoevsky. Which is like, painful to read and profoundly rendered.
12. If you want to write a commercial novel you could think of this book as an example of how to write one because it is commercial and as a whole and full novel it reads fine.
13. People Magazine has it listed next to Bridget Jones’ Diary lady right now http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20741882,00.html
14. I don’t even know what a bar of French-milled soap is but he has some in this book.
15. Have you ever seen The Triplets of Belleville? It kinda reminded me of it in a way.
16. This book has a travel writing vibe to it.
17. “I don’t get seasick.”
18. “I can’t believe there’s art down here.”
19. “I’d almost given up on conceptualizing without even realizing it.”
20. Our protag’s not a wuss but he is just nice.
21. Greek wine council is apparently a thing.
22. I feel like it’s actually an intuitively female novel in some ways.
23. Your mom or anyone who ever liked any John Cusack movie will like this book.
24. Betcha Charles Blackstone is fine with that.
25. This is a super commercial novel for a super commercial reader which is a large market and widely accepted and there’s nothing wrong with that. Literature should always have all different kinds of writing. Here’s just a novel of realism. It’s good and I felt like mentioning it because we are multifaceted people.
Tags: 25 Points, Charles Blackstone, Pegasus Books, Vintage Attraction