I just spent the entire weekend in Seoul and had a lot of time to read on the bus and waiting for friends.  I’ve been reading the hefty 2666, but decided I didn’t want to lug a 906 page book around Seoul for three days, so I brought my nook (which I love and recommend).

I started Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist because I’d never read Tyler before and it had good reviews.  I had high hopes, but it did not meet them.

As I read, I kept thinking it would get better; that something would earn my interest — it never did.  To me it felt like Tyler wanted to write this cute story with idiosyncratic caricatures of people, but it seems like she didn’t really know what she was doing.  So in the end, it felt like an awful mixture of people who made no sense whatsoever. The worst was when the characters would suddenly have wonderful insights into life (i.e., when Macon felt Muriel’s cesarian scar)… not that the characters couldn’t (or shouldn’t) have wonderful insights, it’s just that they never had them until these weird moments that make you think “that seems out of character.”

I felt like I was watching a really bad Kate-centric episode of Lost (like the one where she’s already a convict-on-the-run and marries a cop anyway… okay, all Kate-centric episodes are bad) in which I have to put up with Kate just to get some glimpses of the other characters… but The Accidental Tourist doesn’t even provide any good supporting characters.

Ultimately, the characters were so poorly written that I couldn’t even gain interest in the story, which had a lot of potential in my opinion.

It felt like a poor-man’s version of Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, which is remarkably better on all fronts. Perhaps I shouldn’t compare because they are slightly different, but that was all I could think about the entire time I read this book.