Hello Beautiful

Tolstoy memorably started Anna Karenina with the scathing one-liner “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Whether true or not, the pithy aphorism applies to Ann Napolitano’s novel Hello Beautiful.

The family that Hello Beautiful depicts is neither entirely unhappy nor happy; accordingly
, the book is moving and unique in parts and abysmally trite in others.
The existences of the tumultuous-but-tightly-knit Padavano family of 4 daughters intertwine with the life of quiet, broken William Waters, after William falls for and then marries the eldest daughter, Julia. William is welcomed into the Padavano family, and finds his place among the spirited Julia and her sisters Cecilia, Emeline and Sylvie. However, in the months and years to come, tragedy tests the bonds between the Padavanos, and William turns to not Julia, but Sylvie for comfort.

Literature has no dearth of family sagas, from Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude to Amy Tan’s The Joy
Luck Club to Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex. Hello Beautiful traverses well trodden ground and is indeed full of the archetypical feuding and betrayal that characterize the genre, and also echoes other novels like The Vanishing Half in themes of separation, and reconnection.

However it is primarily a pastiche of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, and artfully recreates not only the superficial details, such as the four sisters, but also the underlying explorations of love, and loss.
The line between pastiche and plagiarism is often fine, yet I would say Ann Napolitano,
despite all the difficulties of working in the genre, does breathe something fresh to the work.
Instead of merely rehashing the exact same plot and motifs and contributing to the works’ inevitable “tropfication”, Napolitano at times creates something that reflects, rather than appropriates, Little Women’s glory, without being too heavy handed.

She draws parallels between the sisters of both novels, and elegantly highlights how their roles eventually both diverge from and converge to that of their equivalents, while developing the characters in their own rights.

William Waters is a fascinating character. Raised by parents stifled by grief, he carries deep emotional scars, and lives a life marked by a dichotomy between his underlying feelings of anxiety and his external actions. Nevertheless, the book glosses over the his journey towards the end, not detailing any of his eventual recovery, and making his character arc feel forced.

Julia Padavano too, is a fascinating character. Confident, forceful and ambitious to the point of being coercive, she shows great love for her sisters- as well as an ability to hold a grudge. Still, towards the climax, we do not get much insight into her emotions or character arc either. 

Additionally, the book is written with technical skill. Told from many different points of view, the experience of switching perspectives is not a jarring jolt, nor a dull continuum, but smooth narrative turn. The several time-skips that occur in the novel are not at all disorienting; the reading experience is seamless. However, towards then end, the time-skips become more frequent and seem almost like a desperate tactic to cover ground.

The romance between William and Sylvie is also highly rushed and underdeveloped. For a romance that derailed the characters lives so utterly, it is given very minimal, perfunctory treatment. Sylvie especially is a literary question mark, and her motives are obscured.

Ultimately, the author shuts down far too many promising avenues, instead relying on overdone devices to wrap up the plot that neither do justice to Little Women nor artistic principles.
Her most fascinating characters receive no room for development, whereas, her most inane stock figures are lavished with far too much page space. There is a sense of incompletion that pervades the climax which was brief and rushed. As the focus shifts away from William and Julia, the novel loses its potency.

The book starts off on an excellent note, and does an especially applaudable job in some technical aspects. Yet it loses force towards the end, wasting countless worthy pages of buildup. It sets up the premise beautifully, but for a disappointing denouement.
The storyline concluded on a startlingly similar note to the one I closed the novel with. There was beauty, but also a painful sense of possibilities lost.