Josh Glenn has a comparative roundup and Siegel’s offending review can be found here. No brownies for you, Tanenhaus! And, man, it seems like you really need them these days.
Josh Glenn has a comparative roundup and Siegel’s offending review can be found here. No brownies for you, Tanenhaus! And, man, it seems like you really need them these days.
The only thing that annoys me about this is that everyone who is proudly pointing fingers about this has openly admitted to not reading the book. If you read the book BEFORE all of this hullaballoo, I think it would be at least understandable how such an interpretation of the plot (was she in the freezer or not?) could be made. I, personally, thought she was in the freezer. Well after the freezer moment, Sebold makes several references to chilly, my stone-cold mother, ice, etc. A re-read shows that the mother isn’t in the freezer after all, but on the ground next to the freezer. Should this have been caught by reviewers? Yes.
But should people who have not read the book at all glom on so quickly with glee?
If five or six generally respectable papers/magazines assign critics who misread the scene, isn’t it possibly Sebold’s fault for making something so pivotal so unclear? Like so many people Callie mentions above, I haven’t read the book (and don’t plan to).
In the book it doesn’t even makes sense that she’s NOT in the freezer. Why leave her lying on the floor? You wouldn’t have to cut her up to make her fit (unless the freezer was full of frozen food. Maybe it was. I don’t remember that detail). One gets the feeling that she was definitely in the freezer in an earlier draft.
This is a book that *begs* to be skimmed, though.