Verity might be the worst novel I’ve ever read. If it’s not, I am unable to remember one that was worse.
It’s not just that it’s the book I disliked the most, although that’s probably also true. I hated Moby Dick and Naked Lunch. Those books were unpleasant to read, the latter because it seemed to be pointlessly provocative and the former because I don’t care about whales, but they still have literary merit beyond their stories or the authors’ language choices. Verity, which is by Colleen Hoover, is completely devoid of literary merit. It is barely a novel. It is a novel-like substance. It is novel-shaped. It’s about 300 pages of absolute dreck, and the only good thing I can say about it is that it was over fast.
The plot, such as it is, might have made for a good potboiler in the hands of a better writer. Lowen is a struggling writer who’s about to be evicted from her apartment when her literary agent (who was briefly her lover as well) calls her in for a secretive meeting. En route to that meeting – and here’s where the book opens – she witnesses a pedestrian walk into the path of an oncoming bus and get his head smashed like a watermelon on stage with Gallagher, covering her with blood and, one would presume, some of ze little grey cells. A handsome stranger helps steer her into a coffee-shop bathroom and even gives her the shirt off his back.
Naturally, the handsome stranger, Jeremy, is also going to that meeting. His wife, Verity, was a successful novelist, but she’s unable to continue writing after an accident has left her catatonic. He wants Lowen to finish the series Verity had begun. Oh, did I mention that Jeremy and Verity lost both of their twin daughters, about six months apart, to strange accidents? Verity needs the cash, so she accepts the offer and heads to Jeremy and Verity’s house in Vermont to go through Verity’s papers, looking for notes and outlines. She instead finds a manuscript that seems to be Verity’s autobiography, in which she reveals herself to be something akin to Mommie Dearest.
It gets dumber from there, right down to the cowardly resolution, where Hoover essentially refuses to pick any side at all. Besides the thin plot – which, again, could have been something – these three main characters all suck. Jeremy is about as three-dimensional as the parchment paper I use to bake cookies. He’s handsome and considerate and grief-stricken in that brooding way, and also, he really doesn’t seem to have much compunction about flirting with Lowen while his non-responsive but definitely alive wife is upstairs. Lowen makes the wrong choice at nearly every turn, for no apparent reason other than plot convenience, as she is definitely not stupid, and she’s not that naïve, either. Like any author of a mediocre horror story, Hoover needs her characters to do dumb things, so they do.
The writing is the real icing on the dumpster, though. The prose is choppy and the vocabulary is limited, with a slew of sentence fragments, one-sentence paragraphs, and sentences in desperate need of an editor. “To the right are boxes of things accumulated over the years they’ve been together. Some with lids, some without.” An even clumsier example: “I learned very early on that a human is not merely comprised of only one thing.” (Wrong. The whole comprises its parts.) “We have our conscience, which includes our mind, our soul, and all the intangible parts. And we have our physical being, which is the machine that our conscience relies on for survival. If you fuck with the machine, you will die.” That’s four separate paragraphs, along with one of the worst explanations of dualism you’ll ever see. Most of the book reads like a middle-schooler might have written it … except for the sex scenes, which are among the worst I’ve ever read – and I read a lot of science fiction by male authors. “He fed me, and then he fucked me,” introduces one of the first such scenes, which reminds me of the excerpts from Fifty Shades of Grey people would post to show how bad the writing in that series was.
I know this book is very popular, as is most of Hoover’s work, and the movie is already off to a good start at the box office. I say don’t waste your time. This is twaddle. It’s pablum for the masses, but it isn’t even entertaining enough to make up for how low-quality the prose and characters are.
Next up: Ann Patchett’s latest novel Whistler.