Vinegar Girl (Hogarth Shakespeare)

by Anne Tyler

[gmcgregor]

Anne Tyler's Vinegar Girl is part of the Hogarth Shakespeare series, re-writings/modernizations of Shakespeare's principal plays by prominent authors. Tyler tells us the story of Kate Battista, a blunt and off-putting young woman who cares for her flaky little sister Bunny and maintains the household for her father, a researcher of autoimmune diseases. She's plenty smart, but has dropped out of college after a confrontation with a professor and works as a teacher's assistant at a day care. Her father's research has taken a turn for the promising when he's about to lose his gifted young assistant, Pyotr, to an expired visa...so Dr. Battista asks Kate to marry the fellow so he can stick around.

As much as I'm excited about some of the upcoming Hogarth Shakespeare entries (Gillian Flynn taking on Hamlet is going to be awesome), I'll be honest: I didn't like this one. Perhaps it was the 250 page length, but it didn't feel developed enough. I never bought the family dynamics, or really understood Kate as a character: to me, she seemed almost written as though she's on the spectrum: she's very literal and disinclined to seek out social connection. But I don't know that I think it was Tyler's intention to invite that interpretation. I didn't get her relationship with her father or sister, neither of which seemed very warm or rich. A deep bond with them might explain why an intelligent 29 year old would have been content to work a dead-end job for years on end to take care of them, but that wasn't ever even really hinted at, much less shown. Speaking of unearned feelings that are never actually drawn and apparently just supposed to be inferred, Kate and Pyotr's growing affection for each other after she has agreed to the immigration fraud plan never rings true either. They have a handful of awkward encounters that Kate professes to find discomfiting...and then we're supposed to be on board when she apparently really wants to marry him after all. Skip this and watch 10 Things I Hate About You and swoon over a baby Heath Ledger singing Stevie Wonder instead.