Virtual Beach Read

I get that reviewing The Castaways by Elin Hilderbrand right after writing about Ocean Vuong is like hosting you for dinner at Antoine’s in New Orleans, and then offering you a fried twinkie for dessert. But I say, if you can’t enjoy a fried twinkie during a global pandemic, when can you?

Hildebrand has written 15 books and all of them are marketed as beach reads. The titles include one the following words: beach, Nantucket, summer, barefoot, blue, island and here are a some of her covers.

I’m not trying to make fun of Hilderbrand because I loved this book, and I am sure to get some of these other ones for the summer, but writing a whole bunch of novels that are marketed to be read in a specific place made me think maybe I should write a series of books that are meant to be read in the john. They could have titles like: What the Water Leaves Behind and Yes, I Really Have Been in Here That Long. I could write a horror novel called The Last Roll and this could be my book jacket photo.

It’s true that most of us can’t be at the beach right now and most of us really want to be. So here’s what you do. Get yourself a lounge chair. Set it up somewhere near the sound of cars which you can pretend is the ocean. Smear some sunscreen that smells like Coppertone on you. Get you a tall beverage and a Hilderbrand novel and you really will sit there all day and forget about reality for a while.

This book is Chick Lit. There are 4 couples who are best friends, and one of the couples dies in a boating accident right at the beginning and the rest of the novel is about the effect that has on everyone. You find out that in the 4 couples, 7 of the people are in love with someone else in one of the other couples.

I know, I know. Judge me. But I realized with this book, God I miss soap operas. I was a faithful watcher of All My Children for 25 years, and one of the saddest days of my life was when they cancelled that show. Curse you! Erica Kane had at least another good 20 years to go with all the plastic surgery available to her!!!

Soap operas and Hildebrand novels have intrigue, lies, innuendo and best of all: super rich, skinny people who are miserable. We can sit there on our lounge chairs while we munch on Doritos and watch them ruin their lives with Valium, gambling and alien abduction. (There isn’t’ alien abduction in The Castaways but there is plenty of Valium.)

As I contemplated reviewing this book, I thought I should tell anyone who identifies as masculine not to read it, but then I remembered my Dad and I used to regularly watch Santa Barbara together. Now, Santa Barbara was a truly great avant garde tongue in cheek soap opera that mimetically analyzed and mocked its own genre and featured Robin Wright and cameos by Leonardo Di Caprio, but Hildebrand is no literary slouch either.

Her characters are compelling. Her back stories are riveting. Perhaps there is some autobiographical truth for Hildebrand to the commentary that is made when Andrea finds out that Tess and Greg have died while she is sitting on the beach reading The English Patient (we agree: top 5 great book, top 5 worst movie). She says, “The book, as it turned out, was sumptuous and textured, it was a feast for her mind. She had a college education, after all; she had majored in comparative literature, she had read Kafka and Saul Bellow and E.M Forster…”(23)

I suspect that Hildebrand and I could be friends. Perhaps we come from a similar feminine literary legacy. My mother liked nothing more than to be on a lounge chair with a Danielle Steele novel, and she was a genius at upending masculine literary snobbery. My brother worked for many years at the prestigious Sewanee Writers Conference, and when my mother met a rather pedantic author of a book of short stories about the Vietnam War that was a finalist for the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, she simply said, “Have you read Message from Nam?”

You know what, mom, I haven’t…but now that I have read The Castaways, this is definitely next on my list!