"Perfect Reader"? Not Really.

Readers of this blog will not be surprised that I picked up the novel, "Perfect Reader" (Pantheon, 2010), by Maggie Pouncey, at the library mainly on the basis of the alluring title, along with a quick perusal of the jacket verbiage. Perfect title, right? Perhaps my expectations were unreasonably high, but I was somewhat disappointed. Upon her famous critic and scholar father's death, the main character, Flora, finds she has been appointed his literary executor. Because of her parents' divorce and other problems, she has been somewhat distant from her father in recent years, but -- apparently on a whim and because she is not happy with her job anyway -- she goes "home" to Darwin, the small college town where she grew up, and where her father lived and taught. She camps out in his house -- now hers -- and dithers about what to do about a cache of poetry he wrote in his last year. When the poetry turns out to be about his new lover, one that Flora had not been aware of, her ambivalence about her father, about the poems, and about her role as his daughter and his literary executor increases. She seems to be paralyzed by indecision about whether to publish the poems, not to mention what she should do with the rest of her own life, and although she is perhaps meant to be a sympathetic character, I found her annoyingly passive and preoccupied with her own not very earthshaking dilemmas. The writing is fine, and the novel kept me reading, but I finished it with a "so what" shrug.