peteg's blog - noise - books - 2022 01 21 PeterHoDavies ALieSomeoneToldYouAboutYourself

Peter Ho Davies: A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself.

Fri, Jan 21, 2022./noise/books | Link

Kindle. Shame, Peter Ho Davies asserts, is a lie someone told you about yourself. Colour me unconvinced. As always he has his moments but the excessive hand wringing over who can write what about whom is another instance of his annoying oversensitivity to the latest writerly fashions. (The book is about a man writing about abortion and fatherhood, drenched in Christian symbols, featuring not a few bouts of rage.) I struggled with his unreflective conformism, his inane, mimetic desire for a "normal" child. I think of him as culturally Welsh (with Chinese ancestry) but the way this is written suggests his transformation into an American is now complete. Overall he poses too many questions of the kind that go unanswered here and everywhere, often as little more than gestures, tics; he gets older but there is little sense of him getting wiser. Some of the wordplay is quite fun, and he evokes genuine pain, forlorn and lost, in the opening movements.

Goodreads.