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Monday, February 24, 2014

The Affair by Colette Freedman 322 pages

The Affair is narrated from three perspectives: Kathy, her husband of eighteen years Robert, and Robert’s mistress Stephanie. The author takes a series of events that occur over a period of several days and each character gets to tell their side of things. A clever premise to be sure. The problem was in how Freedman chose to do this. She repeats verbatim the entire dialog in each of the three narratives. On the one hand it allowed the different perspectives to be clearly seen and felt. On the other, it was tedious as hell to keep reading the same thing over and over and over again. And I’m sure that somewhere in the universe a wife and her husband’s mistress might well meet and handle a confrontation in much the same way as Kathy and Stephanie did. I’m equally sure I wouldn’t. Not that that's a good thing. Still it was well written, the characters are easy to like or despise—depending on the perspective you happen to be reading and the subject matter is juicy enough to keep you interested. I will read the next installment simply because I want to know how it all ends up.



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