The Mother-Daughter Book Club #3—Foe and I’m Thinking of Ending Things, by Ian Reid
[You can check out the first Mother/Daughter Book Club post if you’re interested in reading thoughts from me and daughter Evelyn on Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child, Haruki Murakami’s After Dark, and This is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. The second installment is all about Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun.]
I had not heard of Ian Reid, but I spotted Foe on a Barnes and Noble bookshelf and the cover looked nice and ominous. And it was short. So I recommended it to Evelyn and we read it over her Christmas break from college.
Foe is a near-future, sci-fi, philosophical suspense story. Not scary, just an unsettling psychological puzzle of a book. In fact, I can’t even go into the plot much because I’m afraid of spoiling it. Basically, a stranger shows up at a young couple’s farmhouse and tells the guy that he’s been randomly selected for a government project and will have to leave for a long time. And then things get weird.
Bottom line, I loved this book. 5 stars. I read it in a couple of sittings, and I’m barely capable of this. In my opinion, it was the voice that made it all work—the writing has an edge to it but it’s unadorned, lacking in metaphor, matter-of-fact. The 1st person narrator had me frustrated at times, in a good way. Evie gave it a 3.5. She liked the unsettling nature of the story, liked the writing, but wanted more plot. She thought it was trying to examine certain themes (a la the back cover) but didn’t completely pull it off.
I know this is very little to go on for anyone looking to make an informed decision about whether to read Foe. But my opinion is yes, just do it. OR you could watch the movie starring Saoirse Ronan, which I haven’t done. OR, you could move along to Reid’s debut novel, I’m Thinking of Ending Things (also a movie). Which is what Evelyn and I did.
I’m Thinking of Ending Things is more of a thriller and was a little scary for me! It too has a storyline I can’t go into much without ruining. Like Foe, it’s ambitious in its psychological explorations, and I appreciated that so much that I forgave certain plot holes and dangling threads. Here’s a good quote from Academy Award winner Charlie Kaufman, who directed the movie adaptation:
“I’m Thinking of Ending Things is an ingeniously twisted nightmare road trip through the fragile psyches of two young lovers. My kind of fun!”
Evelyn liked this book more than Foe, and I liked it less, but we both gave it 4 stars. In comparison, this book has more detail, more specificity, more variety in the settings (the Dairy Queen!), and impressively captures the feelings of solitude and isolation (queue the snow storm).
I’ll end this post by mentioning that I went on to read Reid’s latest novel, We Spread, which I liked the least of the three. The I don’t know what’s going on here moments that kept me curious in the first two books finally got the best of me. I mean, if you’re going to set up story questions, I think the reader deserves at least a *hint* at an answer. But if “things aren’t right here” is a genre, Ian Reid is the master. You can bet I’m going to read his next book.
Evelyn and I (joined by her sister Josie!) have started another round of reading together, so I’ll be writing soon about our thoughts on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Piranesi!
