Book: Crosstalk by Connie Willis (spoilery and non-spoilery part)
Blurb: In the not-too-distant future, a simple outpatient procedure to increase empathy between romantic partners has become all the rage. And Briddey Flannigan is delighted when her boyfriend, Trent, suggests undergoing the operation prior to a marriage proposal - to enjoy better emotional connection and a perfect relationship with complete communication and understanding. But things don't quite work out as planned, and Briddey finds herself connected to someone else entirely - in a way far beyond what she signed up for.
It is almost more than she can handle - especially when the stress of managing her all-too-eager-to-communicate-at-all-times family is already burdening her brain. But that's only the beginning. As things go from bad to worse, she begins to see the dark side of too much information, and to realise that love - and communication - are far more complicated than she ever imagined.
*
First of all - I love Connie Willis. I haven't loved all of her books, but the books I loved, I loved with a deep and abiding almost aching love …
The first novel I ever read by her was Doomsday Book which was so incredibly visceral and gut-wrenching in its tragedy and sadness that it took me a long time to get over it. Doomsday Book was a time travel novel that paralleled the Black Death in the 14th century with a flu pandemic taking place in the 21st century. Time traveller and history student Kivrin experience of being trapped on a time travel mission gone wrong is a very gruelling but fascinating read that I have never forgotten.
I loved Blackout, All Clear and Promised Land which reads like a Georgette Heyer novel but sci fi ... Totally loved the short stories Even the Queen, Ado and Spice Pogrom. I enjoyed Bellwether. I couldn't get into Lincoln's Dreams, Light Raid, Remake, To Say Nothing of the Dog, Passage and Inside Job.
So I knew that there were a lot of negative reviews for her latest novel Crosstalk so that I knew that it could fall into any category - loved it, hated it or meh …
I loved it.
In terms of other reviews:
- Smart Bitches Trashy Books hated it and gave it a D+.
- Book Smugglers gave it a 4 - Bad but not without some merit
- The Los Angeles Times was review not particularly positive but not overwhelmingly negative.
- SciFi Now gave it 4 out of 5 stars.
- The Alyx Dellamonica review on tor.com was mostly positive but not glowing.
- npr didn't like it
- the locusmag review was largely positive
- The Kirkus Reviews review was positive but quite short.
- dearauthor gave it a B
- fjordsreview was positive about it, but their review was short.
- fantasy café gave it a 6/10 and was actually quite positive overall.
The official blurb provided a pretty good overview of the books' premise. A young woman named Briddey Flannigan is working for a tech company that is trying to develop a smart phone to rival the latest Apple release. She's pretty, smart and successful. To the envy of many of her colleagues, she is dating her rich, handsome ambitious boyfriend Trent Worth.
When Trent suggests that they undergo a simple operation called an EED to enhance their emotional connection, she is thrilled as this must mean that he's in love with her and wants to commit to their relationship. To a certain extent, she also sees this is an avenue to escape her incredibly smothering family. We never really learn about what happened to Briddey's parents, but we learn about her sisters Mary Clare and Kathleen. The three sisters seem to have been raised by their Great Aunt Oona, a larger than life, meddling matriarch who despite having never actually set foot in Ireland, affects an exaggerated Irish brogue and Irish ways.
The planned procedure sets her family and her colleagues talking - in person and over social media, emphasising the over-reliance upon and overuse of social media for communication these days. Most firm in their opposition to EED are Briddey's family and C.B. Schwartz, one of the tech guys at work who despite working for a tech company rejects social media, works in the basement like an anti-social recluse. Naturally the EED does not work out precisely as Briddey had expected and all sorts of drama and high junks ensue …
But things don't quite work out as planned, and Briddey finds herself connected to someone else entirely - in a way far beyond what she signed up for.
SciFi Now describes the central relationship as a "classic screwball type" and it is with a wealth of secondary characters that introduce all number of interruptions and distractions, lots of misunderstanding and crossed wires … Probably frustrating if you don't like that genre but I've always loved those old screwball comedies, musical or non-musical romances where two unlikely people end up together after overcoming a large number of obstacles …
Spoilers begin after this point … beware…
The Alyx Dellamonica review on tor.com says: Willis is a dedicated fan of the screwball comedy, movies like My Girl Friday, Bringing up Baby, and the Philadelphia Story. She has used this particular story structure to great effect throughout her career, with stories like “Blued Moon,” and “Spice Pogrom,” in longer works like Bellwether and Remake, and-to a lesser extent, because its architecture makes it a more complicated novel-To Say Nothing About the Dog. These are often stories where a single woman is committed to one man and then tempted by another.
Similarly, the locusmag review says: "The rom-com conventions begin to fall into a familiar pattern: the smart but put-upon professional woman faced with a choice between a starchy, self-absorbed boyfriend and a rumpled but good-hearted tech wizard, just like Katharine Hepburn in Desk Set (and it does help to think of Briddey as a sort of sharp-edged Katharine Hepburn, or otherwise her put-uponness could get on your nerves).
The trope is a well-used one where the female lead is attracted to/engaged to/in a relationship with one man (the Clichéd Hot Guy) but ends up being attracted to the Nerd/Best Friend/Other Unlikely character (Unlikely Hero). The fact that it's a common trope doesn't mean I don't like it. It's very much the case that Briddey is enamoured by Trent the Clichéd Hot Guy at the start of the novel and clings to these feelings at the start - it takes a lot to make her realise that C.B. is actually the one for her even though I fell in Fictional Love with him from the start and knew that Briddey and C.B. were Meant To Be even if she was resisting it furiously.
I might address some of the criticisms of the novel in other reviews.
Book Smugglers said: "Crosstalk is way overlong, frustratingly so. It prolongs the miscommunication for far too long in a way that feels forced and unwarranted. From the start, it’s clear that C.B. is keeping important information from Briddey, and it takes most of the book to find out exactly why and what."
A lot of the reviews said something similar. I was 'reading' the novel through a combination of reading the ebook and listening to the audiobook version narrated very well by Mia Barron. Dan (who only heard parts of it) commented that he felt as though a lot of the dialogue was repetitive and that the novel seemed very long.
It is a long novel but for me it didn't drag at all. I think it's only right that it takes a long time for Briddey to figure things out. The fact that emotional connection enhancement is possible, doesn't mean she's necessarily going to assume that telepathy is possible. Why should she believe C.B. over Trent her almost fiancé? We know Trent is a jerk, but clearly Briddy does not because otherwise she would not have been in a relationship.
Book Smugglers goes on to say: "…part of Briddey’s character development hinges on her realisation that Trent is an asshole and that C.B. is the right guy for her. The former takes far too long considering how he mistreats Briddey for most of the novel. Briddey’s feelings for C.B. develop over the course of the novel and are predicated on him always being there for her. But their relationship is another thing that rubbed me the wrong way. To start with, when C.B is often manhandling, trespassing on her thoughts and telling her what to do. Oh, it’s all painted as him “always being there for her” because he is a Nice Guy, part and parcel of the Beauty and the Geek romance. The book really wants you to buy that Briddey is the one with power here: because she is beautiful and smart and completely out of his league (if only he could prove he is better than her boyfriend. Guys, the bar is really low here). However, the power differential really tips the other way: C.B. has all the knowledge, which he chooses to keep from Briddey and he constantly lies to her and keeps her in the dark. It’s uncomfortable and made it hard to buy into their romance.:
I admit that there were times when I was incredibly frustrated with C.B. not just telling Briddey straight out what the truth was - but then when he does, she completely flies off the handle and rails at him and absolutely refuses to accept the truth. Similarly, while I was incredibly frustrated with Briddey for being so suspicious of and angry at C.B., but it made complete sense to me that she would not simply automatically believe him. They weren't even friends prior to the telepathy ..
Most of the criticism (naturally) focuses on Briddey and on C.B. I feel compelled to defend them both to the death.
The Los Angeles Times says: "But Briddey and C.B. never have time to come into focus. On the contrary, Briddey's most vivid character trait is her beleaguered distraction. Even before she begins to read minds, her consciousness, as the reader experiences it, is one long, desperate longing for privacy. She's anxious about the interference of her family; she's anxious about the gossip of her coworkers. Her entire life seems determined by her panicked fear of intimacy-a fear which, appropriately but unfortunately, prevents the reader from getting close to her. C.B., for his part, is attractive mostly because he keeps swooping in to save Briddey. The romantic lead who makes all the problems go away is a standard trope, but the best heroes have more to them than an overwhelming desire to protect the heroine.
fantasy café says: "It especially bothered me that I was repeatedly told that Briddey was smart but rarely shown that she was smart. She kept completely missing the obvious (or being very slow to figure out the obvious). In some cases, this could have been attributed to other factors such as still being affected by anesthesia or being bombarded with so much at once that she didn’t have time to think straight, but when it kept happening over and over again she just came across as not at all bright. I don’t think this was supposed to be the case-I believe Briddey was actually supposed to be as intelligent as the other characters seemed to think she was-but it actually started to seem condescending when C. B. would comment on how of course she was so smart to figure that out because it would have been hard for her not to put two and two together."
I agree that it's quite frustrating that Briddey seems to take a long time to figure things out, but while the book is long, it actually takes place over a relatively short space of time… There's a lot for her to process and while she seems clueless at first, when the switch finally goes off in her head - she figures things out.
She after all figures out that Maeve is telepathic without being told C.B. She figures out that it's C.B. who is doing the blocking at the end of the novel rather than everyone losing their telepathic powers -in fact she tricks him into betraying this fact. While she doesn't figure out that the second telepath helping C.B. is Aunt Oona, she knows that he isn't doing it on his own. That someone is helping him.
In terms of the criticism levelled at C.B., his evasiveness, his lack of candour. He does try to tell her things but is constantly interrupted, furthermore - I don't blame him one bit for being wary. The book alludes to it, but the consequences of this gift coming out are pretty dire for those involved. On top of that, it's clearly not himself he is protecting as he's willing to throw himself into the dark and twisted hands of science at the end - it's Oona and Maeve in particular that he's protecting … So when he's not entirely frank, he has good reasons. It also takes her a long time to trust him. In the beginning when he is trying to tell her anything, she rejects him outright, you can't blame him for being reticent.
The other big criticism is the fact that Briddey is largely a passive character - that she has to be saved by C.B. over and over again. I'd like to point out that this is part of the trope … and I would reject the notion that there is any element of sexism. C.B. is wonderful, but he doesn’t work alone.
At the end, it's Aunt Oona and her cohorts who save the day by putting up the blocks and preventing Lyzandra and Trent from having their minds completely destroyed. Maeve rescues Briddey time and time again and in the end she rescues all of them by coming up with the code that allows for selective jamming. I am not particularly fussed by the fact that Briddey as the lead doesn't do everything - she holds her own and there are a number of strong characters (including female characters) around her to take action.
There's no doubt that C.B. was my favourite character. First of all, all attempts to describe him unattractively fail miserably when we get this line. "He had the classic dark hair and black-lashed gray eyes “put in with a sooty finger” of the Black Irish."
He's clearly hot. Yes he's a geek in crumpled clothing with messy hair and a total introvert - but he's smart, resourceful, compassionate, kind and attractive.
There are a few things I do wonder about. When C.B. was clearly struggling to jump back and forth between Maeve and Briddey - I couldn't help wondering why Oona didn’t break cover to lend assistance. I understand why she didn’t from a story-telling perspective, but it made no sense from a relationship perspective. I could kind of understand why C.B. wasn't supposed to be able to read Dr Verrick's mind, but it made no sense to me that Briddey could not given that she seemed to master the auditing/filtering without assistance from C.B.
Moments I did not like:
- Briddey being stubborn and stupid, namely her reaction to C.B. in the hospital just after the EED (accusing him of planting a bug) and also the exchange in the conference room where she learns that he's been telepathic since he was 13. Her upset is understandable but she just goes on and on and on and he's trying to help her and then she ends up at the really awful situation at the theatre.
- Any 'tender' moments with Trent … he was just so painful and bad. He has no redeeming qualities. It's not like one of those stories where the Clichéd Hot Guy is actually a nice guy. Trent is not. He tricks Briddey into thinking he loves her. She sleeps with him!
- She undergoes surgery for him. He's just repulsive. I was really revolted by the idea of her sleeping with him.
- Some of Kathleen's moments were painful and dragged a bit, as were Mary Clare's.
Moments I totally, totally loved:
- C.B. to the rescue at the hospital. It was just gorgeous … and giving her the warm blanket …
- C.B. driving her to the Marriot
- C.B. coming to her rescue at the theatre. That was intense - her breakdown from the voices was just so vividly described and I felt almost as overwrought and stressed Briddey
- loved all the library moments, particularly the Carnegie Room … and him watching over her while she slept, even in his own sleep (picturing himself beside her with her hand on his chest)
- the incredibly stressful scenes with Trent, Verrick, Bridey and Lyzandra … that was intense - the almost discovery, the panic and terror … it was so well done.
- scenes with the precocious Maeve - she was rather adorable
- the kisses, the attraction (both romantic and sexual) between C.B. and Briddey … the sex is clearly going to be totally amazing… ;)
Since finishing the book I have been listening to old time musicals over and over again ... Guys and Dolls, Anything Goes, South Pacific, The Music Man - all because of C.B.'s in novel references :)
Click to viewAnyway, it's clearIy loved this book and as there's no fan fic .. I guess I'll have to write my own … Which I have - here!
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