
I may be the only person in the world that didn’t adore this book. I mean, I liked it. I thought it was very good, especially for a debut. But it didn’t grab me by the throat and declare its understated majesty or anything. I picked it up, I read it, I admired it, I put it down again. I went on with my life.
Part of the problem may be that the title is so, so boring. Broadly speaking, I think it’s a cop-out to use the name of a character in the title of a book, and an author who does it will often have to work twice as hard to get me to pay attention. Charlotte Bronte (Jane Eyre), Austen (Emma), Flaubert (Madame Bovary), and Dostoyevsky (Anna Karenina) are all guilty of it, and don’t even get me started on Dickens (David Copperfield, Nicholas Nickleby, and Barnaby Rudge, off the top of my head). I give Wodehouse a free pass for some reason because Jeeves in the context of a title feels less like a character and more like a manifestation of the collective unconscious; but I put off reading Villette for ages before I realised it was the name of a town, not a person (though that’s almost as bad).