If You Follow Me

by Malena Watrous

Book Overview

"I love, love, love If You Follow Me. It's fearlessly honest, occasionally heartbreaking, and extremely funny, and I can't recommend it highly enough." -- Curtis Sittenfeld, New York Times bestselling author of Prep and American Wife

In Malena Watrous' beautifully wrought and deftly written debut novel, we...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0061732850
• ISBN13: 9780061732850
• Release Date: March 2010
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.8" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

This book DOES transcend. Read it.

I'm more than a little disturbed by the Publisher's Weekly review, which states (in part), "though this tale of culture shock, growing up, and throwing out isn't especially distinguished from its fish-out-of-water peers, it does the trick as a diversion." Did the reviewer read the same poignant, touching, beautiful book that I did? To the contrary, this book DOES transcend. Yes, the setting - an American, fresh out of college - initially seems like a cliche plot contrivance. Instead, it's the only appropriate setting for the story. In the story, a recent college graduate and her girlfriend move to Japan to teach English. They met at a bereavement support group - the narrator has recently lost her father and her girlfriend, her mother. The two are at crucially different places in their healing. Every line, every character, every scene of this book was obviously carefully considered, and yet none of it feels even remotely overwrought. Honestly, I haven't been so moved by a book in some time. It's all so real. The character struggles with her grief, with her relationship, with the challenges of her situation in Japan. Yet none of it is an actual struggle - it's too true to life. This isn't a "fish out of water" tale, as Publisher's Weekly suggests. It's the tale of what real people of this age and this generation go through.

Hilarious and compelling debut

I couldn't put this book down! From the novel's very first letter detailing Miss Marina's culturally improper trash habits to its moving ending with the heroine alone by the sea, If You Follow Me takes the traditional novel of manners and turns it on its head. In many ways, Watrous' writing reminded me of a cross between Jane Austen and Edith Wharton: coincidence, misunderstandings, romance, and disguises abound. The dialogue is sharp and incredibly funny, and the characters are so real. And yet lurking beneath this well-executed, crowd-pleasing structure is a tremendous personal loss that gives the novel its depth, and puts Marina in the company of Countess Olenska and other literary heroines who face down tragedy. I loved how recycling became a strangely apt metaphor for grief in the book, as Marina learns which things from the past she must throw away, and what will be incorporated into her new life. It's part of Watrous' noteworthy talent that she can take a mundane part of contemporary existence and illuminate it until it reflects back something we didn't know about ourselves. Looking forward to more by this author.

Original, Moving, and Very Funny

If You Follow Me's hilarious and intelligent heroine, Marina, decides to teach English in Japan soon after graduating college, hoping to escape the pain and grief of her father's recent suicide. She finds herself not in cosmopolitan Tokyo or beautiful Kyoto, but in working-class Shika, a town economically dependent on its alarmingly out-of-date nuclear power plant and filled with neighbors and colleagues who monitor her clumsy attempts to adapt to local custom. Living in a tiny house with her cat and her increasingly distant girlfriend, Marina struggles both to mourn her losses and to connect meaningfully with her new community. The world Watrous creates feels so real that you can easily see yourself in Marina's shoes, dealing with a beat-up car, sneakily disposing of a refrigerator, counseling a student in crisis. Watrous portrays a series of unique and specific characters with empathy, complexity and humor: the teacher struggling with an autistic son at home, the dentist who stretches out his treatments in order to practice English with his patients, and most of all, the proper, sensitive supervisor with whom she may be falling in love. The result is a highly original and moving account of coming of age away from home. Marina's point of view is ironic but never cynical, sympathetic but never sentimental, linguistically clever but never obscure, and above all, self-deprecating and observant on every page. I can't recommend this book highly enough.

beautifully written tale of of a young foreign woman in a small Japanese town

Great literature transcends its characters and plot and brings greater understanding and critical thought, and If You Follow Me is that kind of great literature. It's mostly the story of Marina, who is spending her first year out of college teaching college in rural Japan. She's still dealing with her father's suicide, and her girlfriend, Carolyn, is also teaching in Japan. They're the only foreigners in a small, rural town with a nuclear power plant. They live in the only apartment available for two people. Watrous did an amazing job of translating the experience of teaching in rural Japan to the reader. The novel opens with the first of what will be many letters informing Marina of her violations of gomi law. The Japanese have a complex system of recycling, burning and disposing of their trash on different days, in different places and with different means. Instantly, I was as dumbfounded and embarrassed as Marina was for her inevitable and unintentional rudeness and violation of law. Perhaps the greatest cultural insults are the ones we commit when we don't even think to ask, such as how to sort our garbage. Although the novel is told from Marina's point of view, it's brilliance is in the reader's ability to see the story not only through Marina's eyes, but also from the perspectives of the other characters, major and minor, and to truly understand each subtle moment from multiple sides. Many authors use multiple narrators to introduce readers to other points of view, but Watrous weaves language barriers, cultural misunderstanding and the human emotions beautifully into a coherent whole, and Marina still has a strong enough presence to feel like a friend from the novel's first pages. It's a testament to her skill as both a writer and a storyteller that this reader could so easily and quickly understand the perspective of those who have never ventured away from this small town in rural Japan. Perhaps it's not a novel for everyone. It's not a sentimental tale of teaching English in a foreign land and bridging cultural gaps. It is, however, among the most honest and thoughtful novels I've read in a very long time. If you're a fan of language, cultural divides, and people watching, then you'll probably love it.