Review: “Seven Types of Ambiguity,” by Elliot Perlman

“Seven Types of Ambiguity” is a somewhat over-ambitious novel about Simon, an unemployed and melancholy elementary school teacher, obsessed with a failed relationship from some 10 years prior. In an act of desperation, Simon reasserts himself within his former girlfriend’s life through an unconventional act - the very temporary kidnapping of her child - with somewhat bizarre consequences. This event, which ultimately turns out to be quite harmless and misunderstood, forces the central characters to confront, re-examine, and tell their own stories. Hearing their perception of the events and their subsequent responses, counter-balanced by the perceptions of others, is the real joy of this book. This is a dark story with deeply flawed characters, all building towards a very satisfactory “tie up all the loose-ends (except for one - in case of a sequel)” kind of way.

Told in seven sections by seven different narrators, this novel does an admirable job exploring how various people see and experience the same events and how the inherent subjectivity of these retellings does not actually illuminate a unified truth (the term for this in psychology is the “Rashomon effect”). While this overlapping narrative is sometimes used to great effect in the book, it often degrades into a self-indulgent and repetitive exercise, too often resulting in unnecessary plot delay.

Nowhere, however, is the effect better than the book’s opening paragraphs:

He nearly called you again last night. Can you imagine that, after all this time? He can. He imagines calling you or running into you by chance. Depending on the weather, he imagines you in one of those cotton dresses of yours with flowers on it or in faded blue jeans and a thick woollen button-up cardigan over a checked shirt, drinking coffee from a mug, looking through your tortoiseshell glasses at a book of poetry while it rains. He thinks of you with your hair tied back and that characteristic sweet scent on your neck. He imagines you this way when he is on the train, in the supermarket, at his parents’ house, at night, alone, and when he is with a woman.

He is wrong, though. You didn’t read poetry at all. He had wanted you to read poetry, but you didn’t. If pressed, he confesses to an imprecise recollection of what it was you read and, anyway, it wasn’t your reading that started this. It was the laughter, the carefree laughter, the three-dimensional Coca-Cola advertisement that you were, the try-anything-once friends, the imperviousness to all that came before you, the chain telephone calls, the in-jokes, the instant music, the sunlight you carried with you, the way you felt when you spoke to his parents, the introductory undergraduate courses, the inevitability of your success, the beach houses, the white lace underwear, the private dancing, the good-graced acceptance of part-time shift work, the apparent absence of expectations, the ever-changing disposable cults of the rural, the family, the eastern, the classical, the modern, the postmodern, the impoverished, the sleekly deregulated, the orgasm, the feminine, the feminist, and then the way you canceled with the air of one making a salad.

You would love the way he sees you. He uses you as a weapon against himself and not merely because you did. [...]

The writing is clinical and exacting, lending itself to the mood of this brooding psychodrama, but the plot is somehow distressingly bloated and overwrought with many unnecessary digressions. You get the sense that this writer is so in love with his own words, he had a hard time excising and focusing on the most important ones. I’ve read 600 page books that could not have been a word shorter but this is not one of them.

Another major problem for me in this book was the dialog. The entire book is dialog and yet the author is not terribly good at delivering realistic dialog. Each narrator is generally telling their respective story to one of the other main characters, a convention that requires you to figure out who is speaking to whom at the start of every section. The overuse of dialog for all the dramatic elements of the story ends up with soapbox speeches that feel completely unnatural. The characters are a little too ardent, they’re a bit too perceptive, and they’re a bit too analytical.

It would have been better to only use dialog for those areas where perceptive difference in narration needed to occur. This would have heightened the awareness of where the reader might not be getting the full truth. By overstepping convention in this regard, the author has most likely tried to make the reader doubt even the most objective elements of the story, but it’s a move which ends up feeling clumsy and not terribly accomplished.

With all of these problems, I still had a great time reading this story. Blind ambition overcomes a lot of missteps, in my opinion. There is a stunning 400 page novel inside of “Seven Types of Ambiguity,” it’s only unfortunate that readers have to get through 623 pages to discover it.