Shelving: My Education by Susan Choi

I wanted to like this book, I really did, but it was so overwritten that reading it became a chore. And it's a shame because I think the characters -- and I'm a fan, almost exclusively of, character-driven fiction -- were expertly drawn. One florid passage after another, I gave up with fewer than 100 pages to go. I tried.

And, despite being included in the Guardian's "worst fictional sex scenes in 2013," it was pretty widely praised by people I usually respect, so I'm left questioning my own taste now.

I think I've been spoiled by a cabal of 80s-minimalist writers that made up my introduction to modern fiction. Without sounding too much like an elitist snob, I think My Education is probably typical of what a lot of readers like, and the overly-long descriptive passages are like candy? I'm asking because I'm probably not this book's typical audience. My brain only responds to terse, flat, affectless language.

And I disagree, somewhat, with Emily Cooke's Times review:

Choi has taken seriously the sexual love between two women who see themselves as straight. This choice of subject matter is an exciting one, for if a number of the great novels of the past century have been stories of gay love, no really adequate literature of bisexuality exists. Regina does not concern herself with the terms “lesbian” or “bisexual,” and she is nonchalant about the sex of her new lover. [...] Lovers’ gender, Choi suggests, says little about emotional experience. This isn’t quite untrue, and you wouldn’t wish for a novel bogged down in identity politics.

Maybe I've read too many novels specifically promoted to an LGBT audience, but I think there's something missing when a writer leaves out any discussion of identity. I'm trying to think of an author who addresses identity politics without getting "bogged down in them" not named James Baldwin. Some of Sarah Schulman's novels maybe? Granted some of them were written at the height of AIDS panic. I think there's a happy mid-point somewhere between identity politics and no mention of it at all.