I have always been an enthusiastic reader. And a fast one. In fact, there have been times in my life when I’ve read upwards of two novels a day. Of course, that was when I lived in London, was moderately depressed, and my drug of choice was fiction.

I had read somewhere about a person who systematically read through their local library, starting at A and working their way to Z  without regard for whether a particular title appealed to them or not. I don’t know why I thought this was such a good idea–now it seems somewhat robotic, not to mention manic–but I have always been impressionable when it comes to things of that sort. I know I didn’t make it all the way through my local library, but I must have gotten at least to the L’s because I swallowed much of D.H. Lawrence whole in a week or so reading orgy.

This came to mind the other night when I was–yes–reading, this time Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth, whose heroine, Serena Frome, describes her reading habits this way:

“I went at things in my usual hungry way, and there was an element of boredom too, which I was trying to keep at bay, and not succeeding. Anyone watching me might have thought I was consulting a reference book, I turned the pages so fast. And I suppose I was, in my mindless way, looking for something, a version of myself, a heroine I could slip inside as one might a pair of favorite old shoes….I was the basest of readers. All I wanted was my own world, and myself in it, given back to me in artful shapes and accessible form.”

There are times when I still read that way, when I get excited that I’ve found a heroine who will, as Serena said, let me be “my best self.” I thought I found that a couple of weeks ago when I started reading Saving Gracie, by Jill Teitelman, (Freestyle Press, November 2012) and I even emailed her to tell her so. Here was a heroine, Ruth, who is Jewish, mouthy, single, childless. Yay! It’s me, I thought, looking forward to following Ruth through whatever adventures she would have while saving Gracie, whoever that was.

T’was not to be. Perhaps I read it too fast. Too “mindlessly.” My reading notes are these: There is a curious lack of emotion in this book. When I first started reading it, I got so enthusiastic I wrote the author how much I was loving it. I anticipated sinking into it but it never happened. Rather than the emotional life of the characters, what she does is detail the physical life. This happened and then that happened, but the facts don’t translate to the feelings.

That could be a function of the fact that the novel is cobbled together from short stories she wrote. Or it could be a function of the fact that the author is just too close to the material. It’s a trap writers fall into when they think they’re conveying the sensory and emotional impact of an event that is so etched in their memory not much is required to bring it up fresh to them again.

I didn’t know what I was going to say in this review. In the past I’ve made it a practice not to review works that I don’t at least like a lot. But that’s a cop out, I think, a way of saving myself from being not nice, of being critical. That’s funny, considering I’ve spent most of my professional life critiquing prose. And it seems that I can drop right back into the lit critics shoes when the need be, because as I started to think about what I could say about Saving Gracie, I swung right into the feminist critic’s mode, and here it is:

Women’s fiction has always offered critics a window onto the mores of the culture in which it was produced. The earlier novels, pre-20th century, are known to show the restricted agency of women’s lives during those centuries. Female protagonists had limited choices: they could marry or remain single. The former was preferable; the latter was seen as a punishment for being an aberrant female figure. “Good” women were rewarded with safe marriages; “bad” women were punished with death.

With the feminist movement starting in the 1960s, a new heroine suddenly appeared. She had multiple choices: to marry, to not, to live in sin, to bear children as a single mother. All of these choice were normalized for the contemporary reading public by the novels that were published and popular at the time.

And now we have Saving Gracie, which harks back to that period. It begins in 1984 when Ruth, the protagonist, is in her early 40s. She’s single, childless and enjoying a swinging lifestyle, travelling with and without lovers, but still “[t]oo much freedom is starting to feel as bad as not enough. Why did I jump on the Liberation train without asking where it would take me?”

The rest of the novel presents Ruth’s attempts to trade that train for the one she has come to wish she’d taken, the one taken by her best friend, Grace.

“Instead of studying modern dance and living in Paris, instead of loving and leaving or losing a dozen men, Grace simply got on with her life. ‘She always has that perfect 988.6-degree mental temperature,’ her cousin Roz once told me, both of us envious. ‘When a person has quiet confidence and no fear in the world, but is not overly egotistical or self-involved, they’re perfectly in balance.’”

Of course Grace dies at the end too, which leaves me wondering where in the annals of feminist literature Saving Gracie belongs.