I THINK BACK to 1981, picking up Fran Lebowitz's Social Studies with acute anticipation, and liking it a lot but, truth too tell, not quite as much as I did Metropolitan Life. Yet was it a falling-off, really? It was just as incisive, just as whip-smart, just as funny, really every bit as good...but the thrill of one's discovery of that voice, that angle of vision, that particular flavor of neuro-tonic that is Fran Lebowitz...that was missing.
Had I been able to wipe any memory of Metropolitan Life from my mind, Social Studies would have delivered the same kick, I suspect. But a book you pick up haphazardly and then find delightful is a different experience from picking up a book because you found its predecessor delightful. The successor has a tougher job in front of it.
This, I suspect, is what happened to me with The Witches Are Coming. I read Shrill without particular expectations, just because it sounded interesting. And it turned out to be incisive, whip-smart, funny, brilliant. And it's not that The Witches Are Coming falls short on any one of those points. But I came to it with such different (and high) expectations that it was likely not going to speak to me in the same way. So, like Social Studies, I enjoyed it, but it didn't carry that same jolt of discovery.
I would certainly read the next one, though. As I would read the next one by Fran Lebowitz. And I hope West does not take as long for her third book as Lebowitz is taking.
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