Bitter Sweet by Hattie Williams: book review
Overview: Charlie has her foot in the publishing world with a cool, indie feeling player of the Big 5 publishers. Even though she's just an assistant, she's rising fast through the ranks, lives in a great townhouse with two of her co-workers and best friends, and her life is truly coming together. Then she meets Richard while on a smoke break from work. He's an author she's idolized, one of her mother's favorites. And he takes an interest in her. The book chronicles their affair and the fallout that follows. Overall: 3.5
Characters: 3 Charlie is well meaning but insecure. She tries hard, but she's also plagued by a sense that she's out of place, not coming from the typical posh background of those in publishing. She's proud of where she's gotten but always looking for external validation. Charlie's always felt like an outsider and long struggled with depression which became worse after the sudden death of her mom. Charlie has a lot on her plate and is sympathetic in many ways, but she's also a difficult character to fully get behind because she does often treat her friends poorly and rarely gives back the heaps of effort and care that she is given. Eddy and Ophelia, her main best friends, are always there for her, even when she pushes them away repeatedly over her relationship with Richard. They have an endless amount of love and care for her and take her back at every disappointment.
Richard is tough. He falls into the same character problem that I find with nearly every old man who engages in an affair with a younger woman in books. We're told they're magnetic and interesting and so undeniable, but they just seem awful and old and undesirable and manipulative on the page. We're reading the novel in a first person account by Charlie, and yet, beyond this being an author her deceased mother loved, I can't see why Charlie would've entertained this man for five seconds when the job that she loved was on the line. The biggest issue is that we're told that Charlie loves him, that he's amazing, that she's infatuated over and over. The only ways its shown is in moments of her dropping her friends for him. I understand Richard is a bad guy and the novel is telling a story of abuse. We should recognize that he is a monster. But to effectively tell the story in the way Williams has decided too, she needed to give us a bit more insight into what made Richard human and interesting and compelling. He was so one dimensional and obviously awful that it made the book feel almost pointless to read. I just kept wondering why she would ever ruin her life for this man, and a first person story like this should really make me understand her point of view before it all came crashing down.
This is especially obvious when William adds a contrasting love interest option. But she made this other love interest character so wonderful and perfect and gorgeous and endlessly understanding that it only makes the Richard situation worse. Yes, I get trying to use this character to make the point that her affection for Richard is compulsive, but I struggled to get into the narrative because of the pervasive flatness of this central set of characters.
I did really appreciate how Williams evolved Charlie's relationship with her family and her boss over the course of the novel, and those threads were really lovely and refreshing in a somewhat flat collection of characters.
Plot: 3 This book is fairly bloated. I usually don't love this category of books of women reflecting on their affairs with much older men when they were very young and vulnerable. I find they often feel flat and not compelling in the characterization like I described above. But there were enough other facets that I love that I decided to give the book a go—London, publishing, a cool friend group. And the first few chapters, I couldn't put the book down. I felt compelled to keep reading late into the night as I learned more about the world Charlie inhabited. While it felt like there was a lot of telling and summary from the start, the world was rich enough that I was thoroughly intrigued. But it couldn't keep up the pace or the interest as Charlie's world narrowed down to just being a series of fairly repetitive meetings with Richard over the course of the book where the reader isn't let into her head enough to understand why she keeps going back over and over again. It gets fairly monotonous and frustrating. And then it feels like every so often, Williams remembers that things need to happen in a book, stakes need to be raised. But this is delivered in the form of a series of all too convenient plot points. Nothing feels natural, and it doesn't help make the story more compelling. The convenience just got to me in a deeply frustrating way by the end.
I feel like this book would've benefitted heavily from a closer edit. There was a lot of repetition that didn't need to exist, a deepening of character that could've happened in that real-estate instead, and an effort to make the plot feel less contrived. Such a strong start just did not pan out.
Writing: 3 There's certainly something interesting and compelling here. I chose to read the book every day after work and late into the night. I had a curiosity about where the book was going even when it frustrated me. Sadly, the aspects I thought made the book great weren't the focuse. This was made worse by the fact that there just seemed to be a lack of development. Despite how long the book is, there was so much basically summarized to the reader for full chapters where scenes were skipped and the information wasn't brought to life.
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