PanThe RumpusAs Bleaker House is a memoir and not a novel, you might intimate from the outset that Stevens does not meet her stated goal. It can be tough to enjoy a book you already know the ending to. But failures (plural, as Stevens sees herself having committed many), and the attendant long, mild emotional hangover that seems to define her life, are the raison d’etre of this book ... she doesn’t make any major attempts to universalize her struggles, or to strive for objectiveness. Everything is meaningful, and all meaning leads back to her. In this way, she is a bit like Joan Didion’s heroine in Run River, who tends to imbue meaning into things that maybe she’d be better off dismissing ... The core text, which is the memoir, is interrupted occasionally by snippets of Stevens’s fiction, which varies in quality ... overall, Stevens favors the pensive and blue over the jocular, which is a shame. Though the final chapter of the book is titled 'Punchline,' the reader will be left wanting one.
