Talent (2019) by Juliet Lapidos

1001 Novels: A Library of America

 Talent (2019)

 by Juliet Lapidos

New Haven, Connecticut

Connecticut 2/9

  My high school girlfriend went to Yale- Talent- the sole novel by American journalist Juliet Lapidos- is set at Collegiate University in New Harbor Connecticut- it's obviously supposed to be Yale. Lapidos did her undergraduate degree at Yale.  Anyway- I visited New Haven on a cool fall morning on my way to visit my other high school friends who were attending Wesleyan.  I have a distinct memory of sitting in the cafeteria with my ex while she smoked cigarettes and ate breakfast at the very same time.  It made quite an impression, as did the gothic architecture.  I walked around the surrounding neighborhood and got a brief taste for it before I caught the next train- or bus- or whatever. 

   Talent was one of my least favorite books in the 1001 Novels project thus far.  Anna, Lapidos' well-off, procrastinating literature graduate student, who is in her seventh year of trying to get her PHD (stuck on her thesis) sounds like someone I grew up with- not a specific person- just like someone I would have known growing up, in high school perhaps.   The story involves the notebooks of a Vonnegut type of popular/semi-serious author who becomes a focus of Anna's thesis when she becomes entangled with the dead author's disgraced niece, a sketchy antiquarian who dabbles in replicating rare books and selling them online.  Only in literary fiction!

  Published in 2019, Talent came a few years too early to catch any neurodiversity vibes, but it's clear that Anna is a little different, a little neuro-diverse.  The whole effort fell flat for me.