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The Vices (2011)

by Lawrence Douglas(Favorite Author)

3.38 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

1590514157 (ISBN13: 9781590514153)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Other Press

review 1: I read THE VICES because Douglas teaches at Amherst, Oliver Vice is clearly based on Alex George, an Amherst philosophy professor, and a former teacher of mine at Amherst highly recommended it. I have to confess: I wasn't expecting much. You can imagine, then, how pleasantly surprised I was to discover that this book is a beauty: strongly plotted, attractively written, completely in control of its tone. For me, THE VICES' chief flaw is merely one of degree. The narrator and Oliver Vice are never as distinctly different as they ought to be for the book to pack the kind of wallop it's capable of. Douglas' unnamed narrator and Oliver Vice, as different as they are, are actually quite similar (and not, I believe, in the way Douglas intended). After all, is a boy from Great... more Neck, Long Island who attends Brown University and Yale Law School, and teaches creative writing at "Harkness College," really so different from a boy from the Upper East Side who attends Cambridge and Harvard Universities and teaches philosophy at "Harkness College," mother and religion notwithstanding? Even if one went to public school and one went to Horace Mann, one obeys his heart and the other his head, one is a secular Jew and the other, seemingly, a gentile prince, aren't they really the same creature? ("Exit 33" be damned, Great Neck has one of the best public schools in the country!) Still, I found the book thoughtfully constructed, a formal descendant of The Great Gatsby and Brideshead Revisited postmodernized by Nabokovian meta-fiction. Wish I had spoken to Douglas about storytelling when I was in college. He knows his stuff.
review 2: This book may have rather limited appeal outside of the Amherst community (it's written by a poli sci prof), but for former students of either Alex George or Lawrence Douglas, the gossip is hard to resist. The title character, Vice, is a philosophy professor described to look exactly like George, with a similarly blue blood background and astringent personality. The novel starts strong, with the narrator (the Douglas-like character) puzzling over Vice's recent disappearance off the bow of the Queen Mary. Unfortunately, the writing does not keep pace with the first few pages. The narrator, a creative writing professor at Harkness College (an imperfect but phonetically close anagram for "Amherst"), is criticized by one of his students for relying too heavily on cliche. Douglas suffers from the same problem; promising passages (like the appearance of Vice's several "widows" at his funeral) get short shrift while less interesting descriptions (like a mall parking lot) are described more fully, without the additional words evoking concrete images. The narrator's obsesssion with Vice (his wife disparagingly calls it "love") could have been an interesting relationship to explore; instead, Douglas never penetrates its surface (perhaps the lack of "penetration" is key). The narrator and Vice enact a familiar chick lit trope: the fat girl admires the golden girl until she finds out that it's better to be emotionally and physically satiated than hungry. The Vices has potentially rich content; Douglas' writing and his timidness towards the narrator-Vice relationship prevent it from fulfilling the promise of the first few pages. less

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