It's Lost On Me

Not being much of a team player by nature, I don't see much point in book groups, and have successfully avoided them so far, except to snort scornfully at the lists of questions now included at the back of books to spark tongue-tied readers into conversation. But I had to give an "Amen, sister!" to one question at the back of Lost: "Some people find Winnie Rudge to be downright unlikable. How did you feel about her?" Indeed, the protagonist of Maguire's latest effort is phenomenally difficult to like, and I admit that I was never able to do it, even a little bit. The reader's guide tries to be forgiving: "When you realized the traumatic reason for her compulsive evasion of the truth, did you find her orneriness and prickliness understandable?" Well...no. As a heroine, she still sucks, plain and simple.

Sadly, we are stuck with her for every page of this story. Winnie Rudge, a lonely middle-aged writer of children's fiction, is attempting to branch out into adult fiction. This leap of genre has dried her creative juices to a trickle, as the once-prolific writer now settles for staring spookily into the middle distance and mentally narrating passages from her rambling, nonsensical novel. Anyway, after crashing a meeting for childless couples who wish to adopt foreign babies ("research"), Winnie takes off for London, to visit her stepcousin John and to seek out some inspiration for her novel, which tentatively concerns one Wendy Prietzke's search to uncover and resurrect the ghost of Jack the Ripper in modern-day London. John is nowhere to be found - quite unusual for her beloved, reliable friend and relative - and Winnie impatiently awaits his return, tolerating with ill grace a pair of oafish handymen (who may as well have had "COMIC RELIEF" stamped on their foreheads), who spend their days quivering in terror at supernatural thumpings in the pantry they've been hired to remodel.

Days pass, and Winnie becomes obsessed with finding John; she telephones his neighbors, business associates, and exes, annoying the hell out of everyone with her constant interrogations. The pantry continues its ghostly manifestations, and a strange image appears again and again: a cross with a jagged, crooked line slashed across it. Hip-deep in the mystery, Winnie is writing nothing but spacing out more and more frequently, but when she finally takes crowbar in hand and unearths the mystery for herself, her wacked-out days are just beginning, and she's going to drag everyone along for the ride, whether they want to go or not.

But I mentioned before how thoroughly this Winnie makes my hackles rise. She infuriates me, in fact, from her prim, pretentious appropriation of British syntax and vocabulary, to her compulsive need to make up ridiculous and stupid lies, to her reliance on catty sniping to cover up her real feelings. I looked hard for a redeeming quality, but found none. And when I realized the traumatic reason for her compulsive evasion of the truth...well, I still thought she was annoying and lame. Maguire is an incredibly talented writer, and his debut novel, Wicked, proved that he can write the pants off most of the authors out there today. Why he settled on such a prickly and unsympathetic protagonist, I can't guess, but I'm thinking it was a bad choice. It's entirely understandable that Maguire would want to break away before he gets typecast as "that guy who rewrites fairy tales," however well done they may be (and they are). But I'm not entirely sure this was the way to go. Choking on its own ambience, so labyrinthine as to be inaccessible, Lost frequently had me, well, lost. The idea was neat, but the execution flawed, and the ending just seemed to trail off weakly once the book's most intriguing character had exited stage right. That discussion guide had the right idea when it dismissed Winnie Rudge as "downright unlikable." Too bad there was so darn much of her.