Everything you say about why The Likeness is your favorite are things I loved about it too, especially that idealization of the chosen family (I had one of those, when I was their age, and while it lasted it was so magical, and reading the Likeness brought it all achingly back). The problem I had with it was that I found the basic premise so utterly unbelievable--that Cassie could actually fool Lexie's best friends into thinking she was Lexie. It wasn't presented as a surrealist metaphor for how our friends don't really know us, it was presented as realism, and as realism I didn't buy it. I kept waiting for French to justify it somehow (they really were separated at birth! which would have been hokey as hell, but perhaps scratched the persistent itch of disbelief I was having). My not-entirely-suspended disbelief cast a pall over the rest of the story.
Likewise, I agree with you about Faithful Place; the things you didn't like about it are dead-on right. The tropes you mention are really overdone, and French didn't do anything new with them, and that's boring. And... while I was reading it, that didn't bother me at all. I didn't even think about it. The characters were so well-rendered that they just crowded out everything else in my mind.
I suppose what that boils down to is that different readers make a (sometimes unconscious) agreement with the author to suspend their disbelief in different ways, and those ways have more to do with the psyche of the reader than with any objective truth about the writer, or about Fiction in general.
Some critic, I forget who, said that French's books are all actually about architecture. I agree with that. Architecture as a means to explore class, for one. And houses as signifiers of family and its rupture.
I have finished The Secret Place now, and agree that structurally it's a little wobbly. I also didn't care about the characters the way I cared about Adam and Frank and Cassie. I didn't care about Scorcher that way either, but I loved Broken Harbor anyway. If there's a definition of a modern take on the gothic novel, Broken Harbor is IT.
In the Woods and Faithful Place and The Likeness are all love stories, I think (in Faithful Place the pairing is Frank/family of origin) and I do love a good love story. The love story in Secret Place--between the four girls--never quite took off for me, though I ADORED the way she casually rendered their casual magical abilities. That felt so true, and an example of how a writer can call something into being and make it embodied.
Re: Tana French and your dissertation
Likewise, I agree with you about Faithful Place; the things you didn't like about it are dead-on right. The tropes you mention are really overdone, and French didn't do anything new with them, and that's boring. And... while I was reading it, that didn't bother me at all. I didn't even think about it. The characters were so well-rendered that they just crowded out everything else in my mind.
I suppose what that boils down to is that different readers make a (sometimes unconscious) agreement with the author to suspend their disbelief in different ways, and those ways have more to do with the psyche of the reader than with any objective truth about the writer, or about Fiction in general.
Some critic, I forget who, said that French's books are all actually about architecture. I agree with that. Architecture as a means to explore class, for one. And houses as signifiers of family and its rupture.
I have finished The Secret Place now, and agree that structurally it's a little wobbly. I also didn't care about the characters the way I cared about Adam and Frank and Cassie. I didn't care about Scorcher that way either, but I loved Broken Harbor anyway. If there's a definition of a modern take on the gothic novel, Broken Harbor is IT.
In the Woods and Faithful Place and The Likeness are all love stories, I think (in Faithful Place the pairing is Frank/family of origin) and I do love a good love story. The love story in Secret Place--between the four girls--never quite took off for me, though I ADORED the way she casually rendered their casual magical abilities. That felt so true, and an example of how a writer can call something into being and make it embodied.