Lost: talented writer of fairy tales. Reward for safe return.

Page 242. That’s the page I was reading the first time the protagonist said anything I could identify with and understand. She said, “You have no business liking me, you don’t even know me. No one who knows me likes me anymore”. That’s about all you need to know about Winnifred Rudge, the worst written female character in any book I’ve ever had the misfortune of reading. Gregory Maguire is a great writer, at least I thought he was after I read “Wicked”, but all the women in this story are written as if the only insight Maguire has into the inner workings of women were culled from episodes of Murder She Wrote and Judging Amy.

Should I be so narrow-minded as to believe that all women act in real life the way they do in Lost I would believe that all women are slightly differing clichés of neuroticism, flakiness and weaknesses. They are left empty and paralyzed without the love and assurance of the men in their lives and they are really at war with all the other women out there who want to steal their man right out from underneath them.

That’s how Winnie acts toward Allegra who is the supposed lover of Winnie’s cousin John. Excuse me, I think that’s supposed to be second cousin or something, by marriage so it’s not blood. Whatever. Winnie has this annoying inability to get over her brief and, in my opinion, disgusting, romantic relationship with her cousin and she alternately pits herself against Allegra and aligns herself with Allegra depending upon her feminine whims. Need another example? Later in the story Winnie meets and American named Irv who she kinda likes, we think, but who she keeps lying to and avoiding and telling that there’s no way she’ll be involved with him. Well when one of the women living near John’s “flat” runs into Winnie and Irv on the street she gets jealous because the woman’s shawl slipped “off her head to show her beautiful crimpled black hair. Her eyes were made sensual by kohl or a Revlon approximation . . .” So you can see, Rasia was overtly coming onto Irv. Oh, that doesn’t come through in the text? I guess you’re right. But from what I saw on Judging Amy women are supposed to be jealous of other women that are attractive so that helps it make sense to me.

I wish that my annoyance with Winnifred Rudge and “Lost” ended there but it doesn’t. The first “stave” takes place in Boston. That it’s called a “stave” at all bothers me. A “stave” means a set of verses or a stanza, according to the dictionary on my desk. I think that to compare this tripe to anything so organized or poetic as a verse or a stanza is an insult to language. So the first stave begins with a completely meaningless car crash that Winnie happens along. She gets out and saves the person within and I thought just for a couple pages that maybe this was going to be important. But it wasn’t. It’s just something that happened along the way to a meeting where we first realize that Winnie is a pathological bad liar. The meeting is for people who want to adopt a child. Winnie is posing as one such “person” but halfway through the meeting they take a break and she tells someone that she’s there taking notes because she’s a writer. So she’s kind of heartless, she’s a liar and she’s incredibly stupid. Why would she reveal that kind of information to a stranger in a vulnerable situation and not expect to get kicked out? And that’s exactly what happened. The first stave, all 35 pages of it, was worthless. It contributed very little to the story except to tell us that Winnie is someone you don’t really want to know which isn’t a good way to start a literary journey of a couple hundred pages.

Stave Two: She’s flown to London to meet up with her cousin John and maybe get some ideas for a story she’s working on about Jack The Ripper. Periodically the narration would end and the reader is given glimpses of a possible manuscript for this story. Ostensibly it’s the story of Wendy Pritzke who has gone to Romania with someone named “John”. Wendy is obsessed with Jack The Ripper and with inventing fictions. What this story within the story really is, however, is a very thinly veiled and slightly altered flashback version of Winnie’s trip to Romania with John. Even though this second story is more interesting and readable than the main story was, it had the misfortune of being thrown into the first story whenever Winnie wanted to fade out of real life and ignore whatever was going on around her.

Another annoying thing about this book was the shift in syntax as soon as Winnie touched down at Heathrow. In these early staves of the book I had the impression that the book had been written by a precocious but talented 8th grade creative writing student who had learned a few British words and sayings after watching Black Adder. It came across as condescending, arrogant and unbelievable. I counted no less than 5 times when someone on the other end of the phone “rang off” as opposed to hanging up on Winnie. It should be noted here that these people were hanging up on her. Not saying good-bye and placing the receiver down, but hanging up on her. I think the author would have us believe they were “ringing off” because Winnie was descending into a Dante-like madness but really I think the truth is that when you write a person as unlikable as Winnie your other characters can’t help but hate her as much as we do and that’s why they hung up on her.

The so-called "story" starts to take form when Winnie realizes that John is missing. At least it seems like he’s missing. His office says he’s not in, his friends say they don’t know where he is, his girlfriend and neighbors say they don’t keep track of him and the two guys doing some remodeling in his flat haven’t heard from him in days. But they have heard from something in the wall. It’s the “spirit” this book is supposed to be about. The spirit pounds on the wall and makes ominous cross shapes in things like the wall and on Winnie’s screen saver and everyone gets spooked. Is it the ghost of her grandfather or Jack the Ripper? Jack The Ripper? The leap from this unimportant flat on the wrong side of London to JTR is so great that I couldn’t follow it. There’s no credibility for this type of assertion EVEN in a fictional ghost story. Why would Jack pick this apartment? Did he have some mystical power that told him that 150 years later a bad writer would come to this very location and hope to write a story about him?

Anyway, the rest of the story is about Winnie trying to figure out who this spirit is and what they want and it seems like the framework for a good story but Winnie’s inability to be honest with people is a characteristic that’s never really explained and it’s a characteristic that keeps her from not only developing a meaningful relationship with someone but from having a basic conversation. The end result is that she cuts off conversations and flees situations before the reader can pause long enough on some of the other characters to actually enjoy the experience of reading this book.

Once Winnie discovers the nature of the spirit the book becomes more interesting but by then the story is nearly over. I would have preferred more of an interaction between Winnie and this spirit because the spirit was the one person in this story that Winnie had to talk to. Plus, the spirit kept asking Winnie to kill herself and had that happened in Stave 1 all the time I spent reading this book wouldn’t be “lost”.