Nicola commented:
>I haven't read _The Pillow Friend_ because I find that Tuttle's later work
>doesn't hold my interest to the extent that, say, her work in _A Spaceship
>Built of Stone_ does. The latter is a marvellous collection of short
>fiction; beautiful, clear, and strong. Some of her later short fiction has,
>in my opinion, become...oh, I don't know, "unpleasant" is the best word I can
>come up--unpleasant for sake of unpleasantness: no great insights into
>anything, no exploration, no mulling, just...unpleasant. (I promise to
>expand my vocabulary Real Soon Now.)
>
>What did you like about _The Pillow Friend_, Ruth Ann?
Oh, well, it wasn't a 'feel good' story, that's for sure! <grin> But I did
find it fairly compelling. I won't give away the ending, but let me put
in a little spoiler space to save anyone who might want to read this later
from my preconceptions--
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_The Pillow Friend_ follows a young woman, Agnes Grey, from
age six to about age thirty. Before her seventh birthday she wishes
for a doll that would be alive and tell her stories at night, and she
gets her wish, in a way. At first it seems like she's just a kid letting
her imagination run away with her. (Anybody here read _Sam,
Bangs, and Moonshine_ when they were little?) But, as she gets
older, the fantasy intrudes on her life in more overt and disturbing
ways.
One thing I liked about it was how I kept having to reconsider
whether I thought there really was something supernatural going
on, or whether Agnes was out of touch with reality. (What most
people around her would have called reality, anyway - she was
clearly in touch with her *own* reality.) Whichever it is, the
'fantasy' seems to be more fulfilling than anything she can find in
so-called real life, and it influences her to do things that, from an
outside perspective, don't seem likely to make her very happy.
For example, she marries a man who's really a self-centered jerk
because he's part of the illusion. To Agnes it doesn't matter what a
jerk he is, what she's getting out of the relationship is something
else entirely.
It's not the kind of book that you enjoy because you grow to
care about the characters, even Agnes. She's not unlikeable or
impossible to feel sympathy for, but the feeling that she was
unknowable got in the way of caring about her. At the end of the
book I wasn't sure whether to say "Poor Agnes, she got her wish,"
or "Lucky Agnes, she got her wish!" But, it was definitely thought-provoking.
--Ruth Ann
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