About book A Girl Becomes A Comma Like That: A Novel (2005)
In A Girl Becomes A Comma Like That, Lisa Glatt cobbles together an engaging and poignant novel from several short stories and some interstitial passages. Ms. Glatt structures her novel around four female characters, with two, the main character, Rachel Spark, and the equally weighty Georgia Carter, getting the most ink. The Spark character’s story unfolds from a first person point of view, while the rest of the girls’s proceed from third person. With a clever manipulation of time sequences, bouncing non-sequentially between the years 1996 through 2000, Ms. Glatt parses information on her characters through overlapping events from multiple points of view. She is most successful when focusing on the unlikable but engaging Rachel and the very likeable and heartbreaking Georgia. Of the other two characters, Ella Bloom and Angela Burrows, Ella fares the better, with a section long enough to establish our interest, but, sadly, she never comes back, save through the eyes of others, and our relationship feels ultimately unrequited. As for Angela, she is merely a sketch—albeit a good one—and, as such, comes off more as a device than anything else. Still, these criticisms aside, the novel is ultimately successful, with the richness of the main characters and trajectories of their lives more than compensating for the deficiencies in the others.
Riding Down a One-Way Street While taking in this story of a promiscuous, young woman coping with her mother's cancer, I often wondered why I continued reading. The woman, Rachel, doesn't strike me as physically attractive, she's snobby, depressed, totally irreverent towards just about everyone and everything, and the blunt sexual descriptions of acts performed by not only her but also by the story's secondary characters (who all, by the way, seemed like the same character with different names and different jobs) were a real turn-off.HOWEVER, there was something gut wrenching and real about the writing that kept me turning the pages very quickly. Lisa Glatt gets into the heads of her characters and exposes their deepest secrets and their most profound fears. She ultimately succeeds with this story by putting cancer right out there and shows us what it's like to live with someone you love who is disappearing before your very eyes.Well into the book she uses a metaphor for cancer that I will never forget. She compares it to driving down a one-way street. Brilliant.For anyone who has lost a loved-one, particularly a mother (whether or not to cancer) this book will be difficult. It is, however, poignant, well written and deeply meaningful.
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This book is about three women Rachel, Ella and Georgia. The book is intriguing and very easy to read, with the main story line being about a woman who's Mother is dying of metastatic breast cancer. In that regard it hit very close to home for me. At times it's very detailed about all the women's sexual encounters, to the point of being somewhat shocking for what I normally read (so, warning to the faint of heart). Rachel is the main character & her story is more complete then the others but the rest almost feel like a collection of short stories that happen to (vaguely and only in a minor way) intertwine. I read this book quickly and enjoyed while I was reading but did feel that it was lacking any real conclusion for all characters outside of Rachel.
—Erin
I wanted to like this book more than I did. It's definitely a step above most "chick lit" in its subject matter, with the main characters confronting cancer, mortality, mother-daughter relationships, sexuality, marital troubles, etc. But I didn't ever feel close to the characters, and the author's style of switching between narrator and time periods just seemed to create more distance the story. And I didn't see the point of several of the narrators, which made me just wonder why the author included their perspectives in the first place.
—Stefanie
