Sometimes a book casts a bit of a spell on you and when the spell breaks it becomes clear that it was something less all along. This was one of those.

The setup is this: a white woman with a complicated story has her house repossessed in error by the county and auctioned off to an Iranian immigrant. She’s determined to get it back, he’s determined to keep it and flip it for profit. Drama ensues.

On a technical level, this book was impressive. Dubus writes primarily from two alternating first-person perspectives: the Iranian immigrant and the white woman with the complicated story. Both perspectives were convincing (to me, a white guy, anyway), and the first 2/3 of the book flew by.

Once ‘Part 2’ began, the wheels seemed to fall off a little. Dubus breaks his convention and suddenly we’re in the third person with another character, the closest thing this novel has to a villain. Why third-person? It’s totally unclear. We’re given a long backstory: he’s a precocious, accomplished professional with an endearing and tragic history.

It felt like a cheat – like the author couldn’t figure out how to tell the rest of the story within the rules he set for himself, so just blew it up. For the remainder of the book, we alternate between two first-person and one third-person limited perspective. It was drowned in detail and suddenly felt like the story slowed to a crawl.

It broke the spell for me, and this was the point where the weaknesses began to show and I started to roll my eyes.

It was published in 1999, which checks out: it’s reminiscent of Paul Haggis’ 2004 Best Picture winning ‘Crash’ (a movie I liked at first but aged like yogourt in the sun), in that it’s kind of a dissection of Big Ideas in America Today with zero subtlety. There is no suggestion or implication in this novel – everyone is an archetype. Every action is explained both from the perspective of the character doing the action, and from the character on the receiving end. We’re all but told exactly how we should feel about each character’s actions.

I wonder if Dubus wanted to write a book where the bad guy is AMERICA, and all the characters are good people just trying to get by, getting beat down and corrupted by the system. What doesn’t work is having to perform fairly ridiculous plot and backstory acrobatics to make it work.