Hard read but some unexpected rewards in the end. ( )

Meg Carpenter is trying to write a literary novel, rather than the genre fiction she's been churning out in order to pay the rent, but she can't figure out where to start or what it's about. On her creative journey she has philosophical conversations with her friends and tries to sort out her relationship with her longtime beau. Our Tragic Universe is about everything and nothing and our place in the everything-nothingness and is compelling meta-fiction. Fans of I Heart Huckabees will love this. It nearly melted my brain, but it was worth it!

I was so taken with PopCo that I decided to read more from Scarlett Thomas so this is my second book.

This is very much like what we get to read in our book group. It is set in a relationship, it is about relationships and not a lot else by my eyes. The characters, at least the two lead females, are credible. The lead male character I found to be a bit two dimensional and he just kind of disappears without any resolution which I found very odd given how prominent he figures in the book. I also found that less than credible given that the book is about relationship that he has no finality either way.

I don’t really get off on this kind of book and God knows there are heaps of them in the bookgroup I am in. I find them a bit dreary and that is how I found this one although I have no doubts whatsoever that it would be very well received by the others in the bookgroup. It is well written but the plot, if there is one, is very woolly. ( )

Scarlett Thomas has what I believe to be an unusual approach to writing fiction, some of which she delves into in the text of this book. It's all very metafictional with the author/protagonist Meg clearly representing Thomas and also having a protagonist of her own named Meg. Not much happens and in the end I was rather unimpressed with this book as a work of fiction though I was sometimes fascinated with the bits about writing. [full review] ( )

Vi, the novel's wise sage on this non-hero's journey, aptly says, "'The storyless story is a vagina with teeth.'" Once you get in, it's painful to get out.

Thomas sets readers up for suspense at the very beginning of the novel, alluding to a way to survive the end of the universe--based on a book the first person narrator, Meg, is reading to review for the newspaper for which she writes science book reviews. Except that the book she's struggling to understand and to believe isn't really science, but a common form of pseudoscience masquerading as theoretical physics. It's easy, we learn, to write a fantasy book when you pretend you're writing theoretical physics.

The primary driving force of the novel is not plot (hence Vi's words of wisdom), but character, especially Meg's character.

She, like most of us, wants to be financially successful, at least enough to feel free to think her own thoughts and to, finally, write her own novel. A woman of science, Meg is pushed by circumstances (unemployed live-in boyfriend, novel process that involves more deleting than writing, lots of wannabe writers invading her space, a dog that doesn't need her, except for walks, parents who don't understand her, a former lover who is now a rampantly successful actor who has taken up with her former best friend who dies, maybe) to take Vi's advice and to ask the universe (at least the sea) to improve her lot in life.

Meg believes she's broken the universal balance when, suddenly, she discovers that an IDEA she had is bought by a tv production company that wants to make it into a tv series, so her agent, after taking her cut, sends her a check for 20+ thousand pounds.

Suddenly, she has the funds to do what she wants, if she can only figure out what that is.

Thomas dangles hundreds of potential conflict-resolution plot devices in our faces--from a "beast" roaming the English countryside to various broken relationships--but none are clearly resolved, leaving us with a book with no real plot, a plotless story.

I want to read it again just to see what I might have overlooked the first time!