Review: Solitaire by Kelley Eskridge

Posted on March 27, 2011 by Phoebe 5939 Commentshttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.phoebenorth.com%2F2011%2F03%2F27%2Freview-solitaire-by-kelley-eskridge%2FReview%3A+Solitaire+by+Kelley+Eskridge2011-03-27+05%3A10%3A15Phoebehttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.phoebenorth.com%2F%3Fp%3D593

Solitaire by Kelley Eskridge

“All one needs for a novel is an intelligent young person and a city.”

I was at the end of my academic career when a professor decreed this in a graduate class—I knew then, from the instinctive revulsion I felt at the idea, and the knee-jerk litany I began to compose in my head of other necessary components needed for a novel (Plot! Characters! Conflict!), that I’d finally crossed the divide between commercial and literary writing.

In some ways, my tastes are still a bit literary: I like beautiful prose and thoughtful thematics. But I need more than an intelligent young person and a city to love a book. I need a story. And sadly, though Kelley Eskridge’s SFnal novel Solitaire offers a bit more than a smarty pants in a metropolis, it doesn’t offer much more than that, either.

It starts out promising enough. In an interesting subversion of the standard coming-of-age plot, Jackal Segura learns, at twenty-three years old, that she’s not nearly as special as she’d previously believed. Up to this point, she’s been told that she’s a Hope, a special figurehead for a new world government. But at the novel’s outset she learns that this was a lie, manufactured by the corporate citystate where she lives.

Eskridge begins to cobble together the story of Jackal’s life—the abusive mother, jealous of her daughter’s career opportunities; the group of close-knit peers; Snow, her lover, who seems to view Jackal with a sort of continual bemusement; Jackal’s corporate teachers and supervisors. But Jackal herself begins and ends the novel as a sort of passive, sullen cipher. I was often frustrated by her choices, but, worse, I never really understood them. I felt that Eskridge held the reader at arms’ length, a sensation made more severe by the lovely, but sometimes excruciating detailed scenic descriptors and the book’s glacial plodding plotting.

A third of the way into the book, the plot starts in earnest. Jackal is accused of a crime which she didn’t commit, but confesses to, anyway (again, I never really understood her motivations, even when they were spelled out for me), and is locked away in virtual confinement, a sort of VR form of torture meant to mimic solitary. The thirty pages or so that we spend with Jackal in VC were, perhaps, my favorite part of the novel, if only because Jackal eventually breaks free into a sort of people-less environment that reminded me quite a bit of the godmod dream level of Inception.

But then it’s over. And we still have two hundred pages to sort out, and they’re spent following Jackal through the intractable details of her daily life. And most of her days are spent hanging out in a bar alone, or not speaking to people on the street, or thinking about not speaking to people on the street, or feeling grumpy because she’s not sleeping well, or avoiding talking to her case manager, or . . . whatever.

I realize that this book is meant to be a treatise on solitude, a sort of reflection on the solitary lives we lead even when we’re surrounded by people. But deep down, I just found this all very boring. Jackal rejects contact with the very compellingly drawn characters of the novel’s first third, and until very near to the end of the book, fails to forge any new relationships. It’s not until the return of Snow, very late in the game, where the plot really develops in any meaningful way, and then it’s somewhat hastily thrown together and not always believable. In fact, by the novel’s conclusion, it was really only for my small fondness for Snow, as a character, and Snow and Jackal, as a couple (queer and young adult and utterly believable) that I kept reading. Otherwise, I would have likely given up much sooner.

Eskridge is a capable prose artist (she writes stuff like, “They slept tumbled together like socks in a drawer” [317], which is very nice), and I suspect that genre readers with more literary inclinations might actually enjoy Solitaire. But for me, a reader who needs more than “an intelligent young person and a city” to enjoy a book, it simply fell flat.

A review copy of this book was generously provided by the publisher and LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program.

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