"Divergent:" nice try, but no "Hunger Games"

For once, I am being culturally relevant, and discussing the hit novel by Veronica Roth, which is also a movie coming out this weekend, Divergent. I have friends who have enjoyed this book, but for a long time I've been apprehensive. The premise sounded a lot like Hunger Games lite, and I'm loath to waste my time with posers and pretenders. But the good reviews and intriguing movie trailer compelled me to pick up the book and give it a read. And I put the book down, having read the whole thing, confused. I'm not sure if I liked it or if I didn't. And I sure came up with a lot of questions--the bad kind of questions, the ones that poke holes in razor-thin plots and deflate the story like a bloated balloon.

A quick run-down of the plot: the time comes the main character, Beatrice,  a.k.a. Tris, to take the faction aptitude test to see if she should stay in her own faction or switch to another. Her results reveal that she is Divergent: uncategorizable, and somehow dangerous. After giving it some thought, she decides to switch to the Dauntless faction and goes through a grueling initiation process, all the while uncovering a plot to overthrow society as she knows it.

The story of Divergent has a lot in common with the Hunger Games: the setting is a self-contained society formed likely after environmental and sociopolitcal disaster on the brink of collapse; the main character is a young woman who calculates every move she makes, whose friends she views as competitors more often than not; and there's plenty of deadly violence involved in the bulk of the story. The differences lie in the premise and the love story: this dystopian society has more obvious social stratification, with individuals divided in five factions, each modeled after a virtue that the faction most values (honesty, kindness, knowledge, selflessness, and courage), and the leftovers are called factionless (basically pariahs who do most of society's dirty work); the love story is your run-of-the mill YA genre love story, both parties uncertain and shy from the start but quickly fall for each other.

The story had a lot of potential; the premise could have taken us to some interesting places, and raise questions about the nature of humanity and society that even teens could pick up on. I was interested enough in what would happen. I kept reading, even as I kept stumbling on bothersome questions of logic and inconsistency, but I didn't care that much about the characters. Everything seemed to happen too fast, in a way that feels kind of arbitrary.

So, first, with the questions: How long ago did they decide that it was a good idea that each faction should just take control of certain sectors of career tracks? And for Abnegation (selfless) to be the only faction in charge of the government? I mean, each faction deserves representation, and Candor represents honesty, so wouldn't that also be valued in government and politics? And Dauntless seems to be a parody of itself when Tris (the heroine) goes through the initation trials: it's all violence and ridiculous derring-do for basically no reason. Why did they have to fight each other so brutally? How quickly did their wounds heal? Why the fuck did they have to cut their palms at the initiation ceremony and there was no mention of a nurse on hand?  I mean, it's not like it's a cut like that heals instantly!

More questions arose as I read the story. When Tris's mom comes on Visiting Day, she tells her to stay in the middle of the pack. But then when it comes to the simulation stage of initiation, she goes on to be easily the best, and that doesn't raise red flags? (other than being the target of the comically predictable bullies, yawn) Then love interest Tobias goes and gives her a preview of what's to come in the final stage, giving her a huge leg up in the competition. Playing favorites much? Why does it matter if she's first, if all that matters is that she makes the cut? At least in The Hunger Games, Katniss had to be first, or else she would be killed. And the whole Erudite scheme to use the Dauntless to kill and capture Abnegation felt tacked on, after we've spent all this time on initation and only hints of such an attack here and there. The whole story was a disjointed mess, reeking of first novelism. Especially in the beginning, the boring sentence pattern of "I do this. I do this. Then I do this," reared its ugly head, causing me to skim over to the more interesting parts.

I mentioned earlier that I did not care about the characters. There were some interesting moments, like Tris looking at herself in the mirror in the beginning, the zipline scene, a few of the more tense, intimate moments with Tobias. Roth can paint vibrant scenes and action sequences. But the only remotely fleshed out characters were Tobias and Tris, maybe her mom. The rest, especially the villains, were two-dimensional at most.

Plenty of characters die, but I was neither shocked nor saddened by their deaths. Both her parents die, and she witnesses it, which I felt was a little convenient; she kills her so-called friend Will, I guess so there's some personal conflict to start the next book with; and Al kills himself just when he starts being a jerk, to be swiftly forgotten for most of the rest of the book. (not to mention there's some posthumous shaming involved) Her parents seemed to be emotionally distant from her until towards the end of the book, yet there is no sense of tragedy that she never really knew them. Even her so-called friend Christina, she didn't seem to have a deep connection with. I didn't really get that connection with anyone except Tobias, and yet she claims to love all of these other people? It seems that Roth spent too much time focusing on action and plot rather than developing her characters or forging meaningful connections between them.

Finally, the character of Tris. Why is she so special? Why is being Divergent not a thing? It seems highly improbable, especially among those initiates who decided to change factions, that only about a handful of people in each faction are Divergent. Why is everyone else in Dauntless apparently so dumb? Why does she not think she's pretty, when she's thin and blonde? Does Abnegation have low self-esteem on purpose? (I really hope Shailene Woodley doesn't claim to be not pretty in the movie; what an eye-roller that would be) Why did the people who formed this society think that giving people the choice to leave their faction was a good idea in the first place, if they insist on such rigid conformity to faction norms, and divergence is such a bad thing, anyway?

All right, I'll stop with the questions. There were plenty more, though.

This book wasn't all bad. There were some cool moments and interesting writing, and some allowances can be made for the two-dimensional hero/villian set-up, but I guess I shouldn't be surprised that Amateur Hour YA is up to snuff for bestseller status. Will I read the second one? Maybe, maybe not. Though I think I'm going back to grown-up novels for a while. Two stars out of five.

Buying In and Selling Out

Predictably, I haven't had much time to update this blog (got some big stuff going on this year), but the book I have most recently read, unlike books like Game of Thrones, did not get a lot of press during its release, at least not that I've seen. I couldn't even find the book at Barnes and Noble. I ordered the hardcover through Amazon.com (I may not rule out self-publishing through that platform, but I will only buy a Kindle if I literally have no choice) as it was apparently the only place I could find it. (Again, no choice) And it turned out to be a breezy, fascinating read about breaking into investment banking, involving sacrifices that most people would not be willing to make for prestige and the almighty dollar.

Buying In,  by Laura Hemphill, who apparently has a background in financial services, follows the "conversion" of first-year analyst Sophie Landgraf at the fictitious investment banking firm Sterling. When the story begins, Sophie is uncertain and full of self-doubt, snooping through her superiors' office to learn more about them and how they came to be a success. By the end of the story, even as she has lost her job and the big merger deal she was on the task force with out of her hands, she comes back for more, confident that now she knows how to play the game.

Though the story takes place during the period of collapse that rippled through Wall Street in 2007 and 2008, Sophie is tasked with a merger project that has absolutely nothing to do with what caused the Great Recession. Rather, she and her colleagues, and arguably Sterling itself, are casualties of this collapse. But this doesn't make the story any less compelling. The time period serves to add a poignant note to Sophie's Sterling saga, in which all the work she puts into the AlumiCorp-Roll-Rite merger deal is no longer given credit.

The story is Sophie's story, but we get into the heads of the other major players in the merger deal: Ethan Pearce, the man in charge; Vasu Mehta, the VP of the Industrial Group; and Jake Hutchinson, the CEO of AlumiCorp who takes a shine to Sophie, and a victim of much bad luck himself. Through these other characters we get an idea of how the financial services industry works and what it does to people. Ethan is self-serving and ruthless; Vasu is disillusioned and depressed; and Hutch has no time for phoniness and typical bankers' spin.

Interestingly, glimpses of Sophie's possible future can be seen in the lives of the other characters, even those whose heads we don't get into. There is Vasu, who has given so much of his life in years and in days to this company, starts to miss seeing his daughter grow up and visiting his ailing mother before she passes away, questioning why he was giving so much for this company that hardly appeared to value him at all. There is Nancy Cho, in whose office Sophie finds evidence of a pathetic love life and personal dissatisfaction, even as Cho puts on a front of satisfaction with her success. Then there are the people of Sophie's personal life, who express active disagreement with the choices Sophie is making and her dedication to a job that seems to yield no real satisfaction. And one of whom, her boyfriend Will, rejects her for this choice. One wonders if it will be long before this happens to the others.

Even with all the hard work she put into the project, Sophie was in the end just a number, a cog in the machine; yet it doesn't even put her off from further pursuing the financial services industry. This makes Sophie's character a fascinating if frustrating figure, especially in the face of making it in a male-dominated industry. We witness her conversion in full, as she internalizes Sterling superiors' words of wisdom and warning, and twists her mother's advice to fit her own motivations.

The only apparent reasons she broke into the industry in the first place were one, to live in New York and two, to make a lot of money. She's coming in with the "right" reasons, perhaps, but with the "wrong" attitude, such as the idea that she would be able to trust anyone she worked with, no matter how much time she spent with these people. And in the end, when she was thrown under the bus with all the rest, instead of looking into other, perhaps more self-fulfilling (rather than self-serving) career paths, she doubles down and negotiates her way to a job at Ethan's new firm.

As a person who knew enough about the investment banking industry to understand that it's unfettered capitalism at its worst, but certainly not that much about the ins and outs of the industry (like, wtf is a "model"?), I found this to be an enlightening read. But even by the end of this story, one nagging question still remains, one that Will early in the book asks Sophie herself: why is this important? What sort of satisfaction is she getting out of this; being barely able to get by on her own, when plenty of other people doing other jobs do the same thing? (perhaps not on such an expensive scale, but still.) I at first interpreted it as a phase Sophie was going through, in reaction against her parents' blase attitude about money...and the fact that, especially after her mother's death, her family appeared to have none. (Though now that I think about it, I wonder...does Sophie have no other living relatives other than her father? There is no mention of any. I suppose it's possible, but still...)