Title: The Tragedy of Arthur
Author: Arthur Phillips
Publisher: Random House
Year: 2011
368 pages
I ought to write my review in blank verse, but I have a cold so you'll have to endure my prose. I enjoyed this faux memoir, but it wore on me after awhile. Arthur is whiny and aggrieved without much payback for the reader for having endured this. It should have been half the length. I don't at all buy the veracity of the family confrontation at the end. Highlight for spoilers: Why would his mother go along with it? Why is Arthur made solely responsible for the consequences of his sister's out-of-relationship kiss? In addition to my incredulity about the event, it also smacks, as does a lot of the family constellating, of John Irvings's The Hotel New Hampshire.
The "Shakespearean" play that forms the second half is less Arthur Rex than just whiny Arthur Redux. A notable flaw of the audio version is the omission of the footnotes to the play, where the fight between positions on the play's authenticity is continued. Leaving out these notes is like leaving out the notes from Pale Fire and suggests a profound misunderstanding of the book's structure by whoever made such a poor editorial decision.
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