“Drawn by of course its Booker listing, but more than anything else I wonder what the Booker judges saw here?”

This is my first Strout work, drawn by of course its Booker listing, but more than anything else I wonder what the Booker judges saw here?

Was it a narrator who, as author, is herself not very confident or skilled? Surely not, since this becomes a style quirk rather than anything meaningful in the reading. Was it the reflections on relationships? Perhaps, but overall there is little here that is new, and what there was–as defined by the relationships themselves–was powerfully undermined by our narrator’s offering us a two-page rather insipid moralizing at the book’s end. Was it the “realism” of the plot? There is a gulf, I think, between the non-narrative of our own lives and the crafted narrative of fiction: that distance is what makes a novel and what makes it satisfying. The events of this novel–some potentially profound and others incredibly banal (how important could it be to know that a return flight had to have its bags gate-checked, for instance, and then to explain to readers what this meant?)–do not seem to distinguish between themselves in any narrative sense. So, realistic to what end?

Perhaps I can say that this is a type of book which is “not for me,” but I might also propose that this was also a title “not for Booker.”