Just Jennifer

The Perfect Reader by Maggie Pouncey (Pantheon, June 15, 2010)

On one level the story of a young woman returning to her hometown after her father’s death and dealing with her childhood demons, including the divorce of her parents, The Perfect Reader also explores the relationship between the reader and the text, as Flora uses the poems her father left her, as literary executor, to come to terms with the life her father was really living, including his lover, unknown to Flora, Cynthia.  Flora ungraciously returns to Darwin, the academic town where her father was so revered and wants to shout out that he wasn’t as great as he seemed; as she works her way through his unpublished poems, she realizes he was a man that she didn’t know, and unless she lets his colleagues, friends, and lover in, she will never know him.  The carefully drawn, reserved characters of Flora and Cynthia, sharply contrast with the erotic love poems Lewis has left as his legacy.  While Flora isn’t able to work out all of her anger through this exercise of love, she does come to terms with her father’s life she never knew of and makes the first steps toward healing the hurt she has kept inside.