I read Jean Hanff Korelitz's fantastic literary mystery The Plot last year and was very much blown away by how cleverly (and creatively) the story was written (in fact, I would even say it was one of the best literary mysteries I have ever read). Given that context, I was of course super excited to land an early copy of Korelitz's newest work, The Latecomer — not only that, going into this, my expectations were also extremely high in that I was anticipating another intricate, brilliantly written literary mystery that would give me the same thrilling reading experience as The Plot did. Unfortunately, in the end, that's not how this one turned out. Instead of giving The Plot vibes, this one ended up hewing closer to Korelitz's earlier work You Should Have Known (the book that the HBO series The Undoing was based on) in both story and structure. Don't get me wrong — You Should Have Known was a good book overall, but its biggest problem was that it meandered way too much, making the story way more convoluted and confusing than I felt it needed to be (I go into much more detail in my review of that book).
With The Latecomer, the writing was indeed intricate, with an overabundance of descriptive details that Korelitz lays out in a sophisticated and meticulous, but also incredibly "slow burn" way. In addition, it felt like Korelitz was trying to cram as many recent / contemporary events and complex society issues into the story as possible — for example: the pandemic, the previous administration, identity politics, infertility and reproductive rights, surrogacy, racial discrimination and social justice, PTSD, social media, religious freedom and exploration, politics, parent/child relationships, higher education and academia, love and marriage, fidelity, homosexuality, etc. (believe it or not, I am only scratching the surface here in terms of the tremendous amount of ground covered in the story). And as if that weren't enough, all of it was woven into a complicated web of drama and dysfunction courtesy of the Oppenheimer family — parents Salo and Johanna, triplets Harrison, Lewyn, Sally, and "the latecomer" fourth child Phoebe. All in all, this made for a tedious, exhaustive read that, in the end, became a chore to get through.
Convoluted story and structure aside though, I felt that Korelitz did a good job in terms of character development (which I also found with the two previous books of hers that I had read). Korelitz takes her time flushing out the characters, giving us detailed insight into their thoughts and motivations as well as how each one evolves throughout the story — to the point that we as readers feel like we know this family intimately. One thing I found interesting with the way the characters were written was that they were all quite unlikable (some more so than others — Harrison, for example, who acted like an arrogant bastard pretty much throughout the entire story), yet instead of loathing them like I normally would with these types of characters, I actually found myself pitying them (which, for the record, doesn't mean I condone any of their actions — in fact, I had the opposite reaction in that I was frustrated and angered by a lot of the things they did). I'm not sure if I'm explaining this correctly — I guess the closest comparison would be that each character had redeeming qualities that, while far from canceling out their flaws, did make it difficult to completely despise them.
One thing I feel it's important to mention is that I went into this book thinking it would be either a literary mystery in the same vein as The Plot or a psychological thriller similar to You Should Have Known (the only 2 previous books of Korelitz's that I had read up to that point) — it turns out I was wrong on both fronts. In fact, this book doesn't fall into the mystery / thriller / suspense genre at all (if I had to classify it, I would say it falls under contemporary fiction or literary fiction). Normally, this wouldn't matter much, but in this instance, because I had placed it in the mystery / thriller category, I was anticipating a big reveal / plot twist (maybe even multiple plot twists) somewhere along the line — it wasn't until I got to almost the end (400+ pages into the story) with no plot twist to be found, that I realized my mistake. I bring this up in case this kind of thing matters to those who decide to pick this up, so you don't make the same mistake I did.
Overall, I did "enjoy" this one and am glad I read it, but it was definitely unnecessarily long, and also the story was way more convoluted than it needed to be (in my opinion at least). If you decide to pick this one up, just know that it will require quite a bit of patience (which may or may not be worth it in the end). With all that said, I like the way Korelitz writes her characters and I have no doubt that I will continue to read her works, though I will probably need to make sure I plan out the time better given the amount of patience needed to get through her novels.
Received ARC from Celadon Books via NetGalley
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