Your Face in Mine (2014)by Jess Row

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Your Face in Mine (2014)

by Jess Row

Baltimore, Maryland

Maryland: 4/9

  Susan Straight, editor of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America calls Your Face in Mine, a 2014 novel about racial reassignment surgery a "sharp satire" but I would have to disagree.   I found Your Face in Mine neither particularly sharp nor satirical.  Your Face in Mine is also another 1,001 Novels example of an author who hits a dead-end-  this novel was published in 2014 after two well received collections of short stories, the New York Times gave it a highly favorable review and compared Row to Jonathan Lethem.  Since then?  Row has been working as a non-tenured creative writing professor at NYU and being a Dad in NYC.  

  It's crazy to see how many authors make it to the point where their first novel gets a good publisher (Riverhead for this book) and a favorable NYT notice and then that is it- nothing to follow.  What is the point of all that work if only to abandon it.  It suggests to me that many SUCCESFUL authors only have one or two ideas and if it isn't an idea they can write over and over again endlessly, they are through. Shouldn't writers of literary fiction be able to come up with plots and characters that don't draw directly from their own experience?  Isn't that the point of fiction?

   This links to a larger idea I've considered recently:  That 90% or so of SUCCESFUL artists are really just telling their personal story to the world, and once they've done that they have nothing left to say. 

  This book though is strange, at least, in contrast to the domestic banality that editor Susan Straight has favored thus far, 200 books and seven states into the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project. I listened to the Audiobook- a good pick since the narrator sounds like me and the book is written with a narrator-protagonist- that's the best format for an Audiobook.  Complicated plot dynamics sink Audiobooks since you can't flip through what you've previously read to make sense of what you are presently reading.