The Kite Runner

This book was gripping and emotionally captivating. However, cynic that I am, I found myself questioning it for that reason. I have never liked being emotionally manipulated, and after crying several times towards the end, and sensing that tragedies were being piled upon tragedies, to the point of disbelief, I began to feel like I was being toyed with. When discussing it together, several of us felt rather insulted by the lengths to which the author goes to underline his significant moments. Things seemed artificial.

Well, what is any story if not artificial? The author does what he does well, we agreed. He arranges events in a meaningful way and tells a great story of guilt and redemption. If some of the literary coincidences were cheesy, the main character was certainly realistic and fully drawn, we agreed, and the ending, while melodramatic in its artistic touches, was ambiguous and far from obnoxiously triumphant.

I was annoyed, however, with the way the supporting characters were devices to advance the plot of the main character’s life. I suppose I am speaking principally of the wife here, who I think was unforgivably used, but the most important secondary character also seemed to have little human depth. Because they were not fully evoked as characters, I felt like they missed an opportunity to speak something of their own perception of the world.

I have a problem with mixing literature and life. Nabokov says that the shallowest kind of reading of all is identifying with the characters. I don’t really care for that statement. I tend to judge stories with the full panoply of ethics and common sense that life wears, and perhaps I deck out real life with too many romantic expectations.

In real life, when you’re going through something painful, the most annoying thing to hear is “It’s always hard.” Always? What do you mean? Don’t tell me I’m acting out the umpteenth iteration of a timeworn formula. What I am experiencing is the only grief, the only tragedy, the story that has never been told and the emotion that no one else in all of time will ever feel.

So, back to The Kite Runner: perhaps it wasn't so much the fact that it provoked emotions in what I considered an unfairly artificial way as the fact that it calls into question all the other books I have read and loved that have made me feel a certain way. I begin to fear that if I reread just about any of my most beloved children’s books―for example, those wonderful Newbery Medal winners that make you feel so grown-up and full of delicious sadness and glory and heroism―today, I would see through all its plot development and literary devices and realize that the things I felt then were illegitimate and invalid and that the things I feel now must not be valid either, because they will pass away and turn into something else, and I am in fact living the plotted life with fewer and fewer chances of being surprised or delighted again.