Book Review

50 Shades of Grey by E.L. James

DNF

Title: Fifty Shades of Grey
Author: E.L. James
Publication Info: The Writer's Coffee Shop 2011
ISBN: 978-1612130286
Genre: Contemporary Romance

The cover is a black/white image of a tie, close up on the knot.So many readers have recommended this book to me. SO MANY. It has a 4.49 average after 1,728 ratings on GoodReads and 4.5 stars after 100 reviews on Amazon. Readers on Twitter have told me how much they adore this book, how they love the hero, love the story, love every one of the 200k pages of this book (which ends on a cliffhanger and continues in volume two, Fifty Shades Darker).

Alas, this book didn't work for me. I kept trying, and going back to it more than I normally would because of the number of people who adore this book and talk about it so reverently. Unfortunately for me, I found it to be melancholy and meandering, and the heroine narrator is so maudlin and wimpy I grew more and more irritated with her and with the story and had to stop. It's amazing how powerful a first-person narrator can be – and what a turn off it is when you don't like her. 

Anna Steele is a senior at a university who is a last-minute substitute for her roommate on the interview of a lifetime. Said roommate is hellasick and is unable to make a meeting with one Christian Grey, CEO of his own company, a big donor to the university, richer than all the really wealthy people (this guy can take the entire 1% out to dinner and not feel the pain) and rather unreachable for interviews with college students. Christian is instantly taken with Anna, and though he warns her away from him, she's fascinated with him, and they do the dance as old as romance, which usually totally works for me, to the tune of “I don't want to like you but I can't stop thinking about your hair, dammit!” (Y'all know how much I love that song.)

The difference in age and finance and place in life is one thing, but as Anna and Christian become closer, she learns that he is a dominant, and his relationships are all dominant/submissive. Ultimately he overcomes his hesitation about getting involved with her, and invites her to participate after many email messages, a very specific contract negotiation, and much rumination on the part of Anna.

This story originated, according to the folks who recommended it to me, as Twilight fanfic, and while some readers have said they don't see the similarities, I do, and they're part of what I didn't like. The story is narrated by the heroine, Anna, and all the minutiae and self-indulgent navel gazing of Twilight is present in this book, too.

So in a way, if you substitute BDSM for sparkly vampirism, and the willingness of both parties to become involved for the whole leaving-Bella-a-lot part of the Twilight saga, you'll get a glimpse of the dynamics of this book – and the elements that really stopped me from engaging with both characters.

My problems with the book rested on two main points:

1. The hero read so young, unrealistically young for me – almost like a 17 year old trying to live a 35 year old's life, like one of those movies that become popular every 5 or 9 years where an adult and a child switch bodies and hilarity and hijinks ensue, possibly with a song from either Nickelback or Smashmouth, or both.

2. Anna narrates and ruminates and navel gazes and ponders her toes and oh, my gosh, when a POV drives you bonkers, it's really hard to enjoy anything about it.

The best parts were the email messages between Anna and Christian, especially when he changed his signature file to joke about whatever it was they were talking about. Those were the moments of life in the story that I really liked, and everything between them was just a slog through verbal molasses for me. The email messages were the only time when Christian voices his own thoughts, and served as the only parts that were his voice instead of Anna's, and I welcomed that because Anna drove me nuts.

Also, Anna finds Christian intimidating in person, so in the email exchanges you see pieces of her personality that were a departure from her worrying, cloying, wobbly narration, and I found that plenty entertaining – but the email exchanges were too few for me to really continue.

One point that I appreciated, though it wasn't enough to keep me going, was in an email from Christian to Anna: 

“In Dom/sub relationships, it is the sub that has all the power. That's you. I'll repeat this – you are the one with all the power. Not I. In the boathouse you said no. I can't touch you if you say no – that's why we have an agreement – what you will and won't do.”

This description of power is something I wish I saw more of in BDSM romances, because the submissive is the one who has the power to stop everything, and that sub's permission is what allows everything to happen. It's a puzzling and fascinating inversion of power: the one who accepts a role of having little power actually has all of it. But in this novel, I wasn't tempted by the narrator to continue much farther past this point.

The level of detail and the density of the text – by which I mean THERE ARE A LOT OF WORDS IN THIS BOOK – just bored the crap out of me. Anna's narration was irritating, and I couldn't get past it to enjoy the story. I know so many readers love the hero and think he's up there with Darcy and Roarke and Jamie Fraser, but I couldn't see what had people so enthralled. From the deep perspective of Anna, who I found relentlessly self absorbed, I didn't see what these readers saw. I just found myself bored and skimming and ultimately choosing something else to read.


This book is available from Amazon | BN

 

 

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  1. Solarissis says:

    Can you do a review on the “Golden Dynasty”, i cant remember the author but everybody is raving about it and i dont see it! I think its a horrid book, very badly written….

    Anyways, i hated this book. i tried to read it because of all the rave but it only led me to wonder the age range of the people reviewing the book is. The narration feels choppy and i totally agree. The hero seems much too young for a man who’s suppose to be 35(?). i either didnt get far enough to find out about his age, or didnt care. I dont understand this trend but many books like this one have been receiving insane reviews but they are so badly written. I seriously dont know what to read in the romance genre any more. We need new authors and ppl who could actually write. I’m pretty much a book snob and refuse to finish anything thats not well written.

  2. KateHdr says:

    totally agree with your review and wish I’d read it prior to struggling to get through the book. i really enjoyed parts of the book but found the overall pacing difficult to get into.

  3. abbeysbooks says:

    Then read Josephine Hart. She is literary, very different, and such a surprise to read a woman writer who is so informed, intelligent, intuitive, she just seems to know about everything and as a result her characters are multi-layered, smart and wise at the same time. BTW she was married to Maurice Saachi and fabulously wealthy, only writing late in life. A dynamic woman who instituted poetry readings in the London by celebrities. And she had a great love affair with her husband. But you will have read no one like her when you do. She absolutely understands the dominant submissive relationship.

  4. abbeysbooks says:

    Kinky and boring very well said. As Jean Baudrillard says, when you push limits to excess, drown people in them, they become boring and implode. That is what much porno fanfiction is doing. Taking sex to the extremes so there is no sex in them. Very Nietzschean. Porno that is worse than porno, hyper porno. Simulated sex. Like “cloned” bodies with plastic boobs, plumped lips, redone faces, liposuction, etc all to be and look sexy. It isn’t.

  5. abbeysbooks says:

    I agree with you. Something is changing. If you read one of the “regular” romance novels their structure is so dated that it puts them out of the loop. Fifty Shades absolutely depends on Meyer’s Twilight and her development of characters. James started it as a fanfic in the early days of Edward/Bella fanfic. She was early at the gate and acquired a huge readership by word of mouth and savvy promotion at the FF sites. I suspect she decided she wanted to make some green stuff and somewhere in the FF had Bella nicknaming Edward Fifty enabling her to change his name to something besides Edward as Bella begins to refer to him as Fifty most of the time. How Meyer is letting her get away with this, I am not sure. )Perhaps she just doesn’t have enough money to make suing her worthwhile. We will see as now there is movie talk. But a mediocre competent screenwriter can take a template out of this book and do one without paying her a dime. I also think it’s time for rom-com to grow up a little.

  6. abbeysbooks says:

    James is not a very good writer. Sort of like a poor Thomas Wolfe in search of her Maxwell Perkins.

  7. abbeysbooks says:

    Never fear it will be in one of those huge book trash bins at your neighborhood thrift in a few years. 10 for a dollar on sale day.

  8. abbeysbooks says:

    Go read all of Josephine Hart!

  9. abbeysbooks says:

    Wordy 3 books make more money than tighter editing 2 books. And her fans from Twilight definitely buy and review.

  10. abbeysbooks says:

    Actually it is the will that is being philosophically explored via fiction in these BDSM FF’s. And that is interesting particularly if you are reading in post modern thinking and the philosophy of Jean Baudrillard. Rape, if structured genealogically, as Nietzsche and Foucault have taught us to do. changes the meaning of rape. The classical meaning is that “rape forces the woman – in this case – to feel pleasure”, forces being the important concept to note. A genealogy is NOT a chronology, and certainly there are “CUTS” in the genealogy of rape that Foucault covers in his 3 volume History of Sexuality. Meyer does also especially in Eclipse, and the movie because it is condensed into 2 hours, is clearly showing all the “Foucauldian cuts” in the History of Sexuality:blood-lust and death (Rape of the Sabine Women painting – Delacroix?) Courtly Love, Conjugal sex, homosexuality is there but both revealed and concealed between Edward and jacob, and perhaps sexual feelings towards children in Breaking Dawn. I have written about this in detail in my blog twilightirruption at blogspot if anyone cares to read more Twilight through a post modern reading. But the offloading of “will” in the dom-sub relationship is very important in our “will to achieve culture”  and this offloading is quite common in many other cultures, thus giving the person the opportunity to take on responsibility for someone else. Canetti and Baudrillard write about this in detail as I also have in a different way.

  11. abbeysbooks says:

    Well then you are going to love Josephine Hart. Try Damage first. It was made into a movie by Louis Malle with Jeremy Irons. 60 pages into the manuscript and it was bought. And Hart herself was nothing short of amazing.

  12. abbeysbooks says:

    I completely agree with you. It was early on in Twilight fanfiction land and she was one of the first out of the gate.

  13. abbeysbooks says:

    Rand’s Fountainhead.

  14. abbeysbooks says:

    I feel the same but I have come to look at Twilight and all the Twilight FF apart from literary concerns. I just do not think they belong in that category, but in a “CUT” in the Discourse. As I have blogged, they are like Warhol’s Campbell Soup Cans. Warhol “cut” into the Dominating Discourse of art history criticism and pop art was born, a completely different Discourse. I think the same of Twilight, that it is a “cut” and for that reason is important, just as the soup cans were important. Were they or are they beautiful, painterly, well-written, literary. No a thousand times no. But what applies to John Cage, Warhol, Meyer and the simulated FF following her is a Foucauldian Cut. Hard to see because we are ourselves in this Discourse of literary competence, style, etc and will push anything else into the rubbish heap. But that is always what happens when the Discourse is disrupted. Fury erupts, murderous feelings, hatred, war! You can check my review of Moneyball as I read Moneyball the same way only the Dominating Discourse of baseball was assaulted and changed.

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