These connections and causalities can feel too neatly diagrammed: Pregnant characters puke with suspiciously fateful timing intergenerational ailments are a bit too directly handed down.
Using perfecttunes series#
She ages in a short series of overbrief chapters, and before we know it, she’s fourteen and battling the same depressive and addictive tendencies as her late father and his mother. As Marie gets older, time flies, sometimes to the detriment of the novel’s rhythm.
Gould remains expertly attuned to the tiny details that reveal a bohemian-seeming New Yorker’s actual tax bracket. Perfect Tunes-perhaps not coincidentally the first book Gould has published since becoming a mother-does not skimp on the shit, vomit, or other biological sundries that accompany raising a child. In Perfect Tunes, motherhood is not a moralistic weapon to wield against the uninitiated childless masses, but rather a prism through which we might reconsider our choices and who we make them for. Nor is it even a simplistic second-wave feminist declaration that a woman can have both a family and a career. She suggests neither that Laura has sacrificed too much of her ambition to become a mother, nor that Laura’s choice is altruistic in a way that childless young women living selfish, frivolous lives simply cannot comprehend. Gould succeeds in representing Laura’s situation evenhandedly.
evocative details buoy Gould’s sometimes mundane prose, as do occasional simple but pitch-perfect observations about life, youth, and infatuation that sear with emotional accuracy. when Laura becomes pregnant, Perfect Tunes diverges from the familiar tropes, becoming a subtle and complex meditation on motherhood and how it can throw all of our choices, and their costs, into sharp relief.
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