There are so many books to recommend in this world that it often
seems a shame to waste column inches warning readers against the bad
ones. There is, however, a particularly insidious and well-marketed
branch of contemporary literature that banks on the fact that people
frequently do judge books by their covers, and specializes in
maximizing the advantages gained by glossy cover art and catchy jacket
notes. It is against these deceptive little novels that the general
public should be warned.
Irini Spanidou’s Before does a great job disguising from the
casual bookstore browser how terrible it, in fact, is. The cover is
appealing—a grainy gray image of a woman sprawled against a wall,
cigarette in hand. The premise is workable: a woman living in New York
City in the 1970s who is both defined and constrained by her
exceptional beauty.
Before‘s appeal, however, is as superficial as the
implausible characters that populate each awkwardly constructed page.
Beatrice is a trust fund baby trapped in a loveless marriage, who works
a publishing job in order to feel useful, who is so beautiful that
everyone who knows her wants to fuck her, whose intelligence is
frequently alluded to but never demonstrated. (The reader is treated to
several references to Beatrice’s never-finished college thesis, which
was to connect the work of Søren Kierkegaard and Simone Weil;
the excruciating banality of this apparently escapes Spanidou
entirely.) There are some challenges that come with writing a character
whose biggest problem is that she’s “too pretty,” and Spanidou is not
writer enough to lend any universality or relatability to this poor
little rich girl’s existential crisis. In one scene, Beatrice ties a
pearl necklace around her waist and gets drunk while listening to Janis
Joplin. If there is a more trite and clichéd way to depict a
woman having a breakdown, I can’t imagine it.
Before is so embarrassingly indulgent that it proved a
genuine challenge to get through each page. Much like the man whose
good looks distract you for a time from how vapid he is,
Before‘s appeal is fleeting and insubstantial, vanishing within
the novel’s first few pages and leaving the hapless reader ass over
tits in a churning morass of artless prose, stick figure characters,
and strained pseudo-intellectual insight.