Overseas review

[ivyfic]

Title: Overseas
Author: Beatriz Williams

Description: A young ingenue working for an investment bank meets a billionaire hedgie—and discovers that he's desperately in love with her. What she doesn't know is that he's met her before...

Review: I promised a rant, and here it is. The book starts off decently enough. I mean, cliched as hell, but the writing's not bad, and I had hope, at that point, that the various mysterious elements of the plot would make up for the cliche-ness later on.

Kate Wilson, 25, works at Sterling Bates, which is clearly meant to be Bear Stearns, in December of 2007. Julian Laurence, legendary hedge fund runner worth billions comes in for a meeting, sees Kate leaving the conference room, and zooms in on her like a homing pigeon. He comes by her cube to flirt, which confuses the hell out of her. Her boss sees this and tries to use the advantage by sending her with "important paperwork" to his town house one night. There they smolder at each other and begin a flirting email correspondence that Julian abruptly halts because he's afraid of professional impropriety while they are still on opposite sides of this deal. Which is totally fair—except, of course, it's not the REAL reason, which as we later find out is that Julian is breaking up with her FOR HER OWN GOOD. So we've got uncommunicative and controlling right out of the gate. Win!

For the first almost two hundred pages, we've got Kate in this Sterling Bates world, with her not gay but still sexually neuter male friend Charlie that she gossips with, and her psychotic rival Alicia. Then Alicia frames her for insider trading and she gets fired.

This is when this book hits the La Brea Tar Pit.

Kate calls Julian, crying. He says, go to my love nest house in Connecticut, I'll meet you. So she goes there. And then they have a whole conversation where she says, this is what happened and he says, my lawyer's on speed dial, and she says don't you dare white knight this, I have to fix my own problems.

All well and good. Only let me just spoil for you how this storyline ends. A) Julian goes behind her back and calls his lawyer. B) Sterling Bates starts going belly up, just like Bear Stearns, and Julian stakes his personal fortune against their bad assets and "saves Wall Street." Financial crisis over! C) He then takes control of Sterling Bates and fires everyone who ever looked at Kate funny. And he punches out her lecherous boss, all showing how Kate can totally handle her own problems. D) Alicia appears ONLY ONCE in the book after the firing, and not even to resolve her own plot arc—to randomly tell Kate other plot necessary information.

All of this happens off screen. I thought, the book being set throughout the year of 2008, that the Financial Crisis would be a major part of the book. Turns out all of that interesting drama is stuff Julian does while Kate does NOTHING AT ALL in his house in Lyme. And let me just address this savior of Wall Street thing—the author clearly worked on Wall Street, but she also clearly knows balls about the Financial Crisis, cause one Warren Buffet-sized billionaire? Wouldn't have stopped it. Saving Bear Stearns wouldn't have stopped it. The book ends in October 2008, so let me then give a little postscript: Julian staked his entire personal fortune to save Sterling Bates. For a while, it looks like it worked. Then one morning, his assets go ffffffft and he is left with nothing and they live in poverty ever after. But Kate says throughout the book that the money is meaningless to her, so that's fine, right?

So what is going on in the book as Julian fixes the world? Kate is in Lyme. Doing nothing. This is the "they fall in love" portion of the book. Or rather, he's already in love, so Kate falls in love. And they have more sex than I've ever seen in a book with no explicit sex scenes in it. It's all pan to candle, which is fine, except if that is THE ONLY THING HAPPENING. At least if you fill a hundred pages of your book with explicit sex and no plot, you've filled it with explicit sex, so the reader gets something.

What fills this time instead is Julian and Kate being gooey with each other alternating with them fighting with each other. The fights are about three things:
- First, this is happening very fast and Kate states that things should be going slower, they only just met.
- Second, Kate repeatedly complains about Julian spending money on her. In one of their first conversations, she lays ground rules that Julian is not allowed to give her anything she can't reciprocate. I cheered when I read that, because yes. I was assuming at that point in the book that she meant it.
- Third, she needs to have her own career. She can't just be his trophy wife. She needs her own life.

Julian reacts to these repeated arguments by pressuring her to move in, and then to get engaged, and then to get married, all within the space of a few months. He not only moves her into his private house in Lyme, he provides her with a car and a credit card, which she uses to go shopping a lot cause there's nothing else to do, he flies her family and friends in for visits when she seems down, AND he showers her with boxes of jewelry and two-million dollar ruby necklaces. To the third, well, the above. He "fixed" it for her at Sterling Bates despite her explicit request not to. At the end of the book, he tells her to pick anything she wants to do and he’ll fund it. And probably run it. But anything she wants. That’s a career, right? Independence!

So Julian has no boundaries at all, which makes him overbearing and a jerk. When they get in these arguments, he always wins them by saying, "But darling, you have no idea how much I love you," or "But darling, I consider us already married, so everything I own is already yours." To the first—that’s not even an issue on the table, and is a really manipulative way to get around having to change his bad behavior. To the second—um, creepy?

Julian is bad enough. What makes this particular dynamic toxic is that Kate, by her actions, clearly disagrees with all three of the things she argues for. She's ecstatic when they get engaged, when she gets pregnant, when they get married, even though she said it was too fast. She takes Julian's money and presents, and, you know, lives in his house like a kept woman all quite happily. And she does JACK and SHIT to resolve her own career issues. There's one mention that oh, Tuck would have started by now. But she doesn't do anything to see if Tuck would still allow her in, given the firing. She goes on no interviews, doesn't even prep a resume or look at jobs. She sits like a lump in Lyme and misses Julian.

So she's in Connecticut and he's going into Manhattan every day to work. The book says she misses him terribly while he's gone. Lady—that ain't love. That's boredom and isolation.

I've lost my job. I know how utterly that crushes your self worth. How it's not just loss of income, it's loss of identity and purpose. I get that it would make you want to run away. So sure, I totally believe that a character such as Kate, if given the opportunity to completely run away from her life, would, rather than do the hard work of getting back on track. I believe she'd even think she was happy. BUT SHE WOULDN'T BE. She'd be deluding herself. And yet we are supposed to believe that Kate is totally happy sitting on her ass waiting for Julian to come home.

What are all the arguments about then? They make Kate the worst sort of person. Cause clearly she actually wants to be a housewife, completely taken care of by Julian. Only she thinks she's not supposed to want it, so she goes along with what Julian's doing only to randomly blow up at him for the exact behaviors she encourages at other times. She is a crazy bitch, in other words.

But then Julian's crazy too. He blows up at her for doing things like going to a bookstore without asking his permission. Or entering the city of Manhattan. He insists she call to check in with him any time she goes anywhere. At the end of the book, we learn this was all for her own good, and no, he couldn’t ever explain things to her, she just had to take it on faith. Cause that makes it all better.

It's not overbearing, Kate explains to a friend, it's protective. This is a one hundred percent healthy dynamic.

I also have to take a moment to memorialize how instantaneously stupid Kate gets when she gets fired from her job. I haven’t seen a character get hit with a stupid stick this badly since Smallville.

The plot requires, for angst reasons, that Kate accidentally gets pregnant. She’s on the pill, but there are plenty of ways that she could still get pregnant. She could forget it for a day, she could take it at inconsistent times of day, she could be one of the tiny percentage of women that get pregnant on the pill despite everything.

What actually happens is she forgets to take the pill. For a month. She even carries around an empty pack with her in her purse, but it’s not until she sees a note for a missed doctor’s appointment that she realizes she hasn’t taken it for a month. Really? Really? Forgetting a day or two, especially outside of your normal routine, I understand. But how do you forget for a month? Unless she didn’t forget, she “forgot.”

Once she’s realized this, she continues to have unprotected sex for three weeks without contraception or telling her partner, at which point she takes a pregnancy test and SHOCKINGLY is pregnant.

There are other examples, too. There’s some vague threat against her, at least according to Julian. Given this, when she discovers that her files have been rifled through, you might thing she’d tell him immediately. Or someone. Like the bodyguard he hired. Anyone really. But you’d be wrong. She doesn’t tell anyone for days, and only then it’s a oh hey, I was going to tell…

At the end, she goes back in time to warn Julian about his fate because she’s sure he’s dead. And by sure, we mean a crazy guy tells her he’s dead. She doesn’t check the body—she doesn’t even see the body—she didn’t even see whatever incident that led to his death. She just hears from crazy dude that Julian’s dead and bamf’s herself back in time before Julian, who is running towards her, can stop her. Because the plot requires it.

Stupid stick. I swear.

Now let’s talk about the whole time travel plot.

Julian Laurence is actually Julian Ashford, a soldier poet who went MIA in WWI. For mysterious reasons, he popped up in 1996, where he got to work establishing a hedge fund. Cause I guess all you need for that is gumption or something.

Several of his other WWI comrades also time traveled and now work with him.

But all of this was twelve years in the past. The book glosses over everything about that that’s interesting. Like, first, him dealing with the trauma of WWI. Or him adjusting to modern times. Or how he managed to establish himself successfully. (I spent most of the book thinking that there must be other time travel going on which made him able to time the markets cause he knew what was going to happen but nope. Just gumption.) Or how the different soldiers, pulled out at different times, deal with the fact that some of them lived on for some time after they thought others had died.

All of that would be terribly interesting. All of that is ignored. When Kate asks, Julian just makes vague comments about that being a long time ago, and he’s dealt with all of that.

So the two interesting things that could be happening in this book—the Wall Street/Financial Crisis plot and the actual time travel plot—HAPPEN OFF SCREEN.

This is especially unforgivable as the plot of the book, this whole threat to Kate and Julian, is (spoiler!) from one of Julian’s comrades who was pulled out of the war after him and is not handling modernity well. Why? He’s nuts. There’s some vague notion that he’s upset with Julian for marrying someone other than his (the comrade, not Julian) sister, but that doesn’t make any sense. And maybe it would have been a compelling psychological portrait of dislocation and isolation, and an analogy for the soldier’s experience returning to civilian life after war, if only this character had been in MORE THAN TWO SCENES before he shot himself.

Seriously, these comrades that are supposed to be pivotal to the plot don’t even appear in the middle three hundred pages of the book.

Then there’s the mechanics of the time travel itself. I’m happy with this being hand wavy—it’s fine if you don’t want to spend a lot of worldbuilding time on machines and institutes. But if you’re going to answer the question, it had better be a good answer. And this is…not.

An old historian willed these guys into the future. That’s it. He liked his subjects, and he just thought really hard, and poof!

Given the fact that one of them then goes nuts and kills himself, you might think there was some addressing of the ethics of yanking these people out of their timeline, but no. Or, given the fact that Julian talks a lot in the past about even if he knows for certain he’s going to die on a given raid, he will not avoid it and let someone else die in his place, you might think he’d have issues with a random dude forcing him, essentially, to abandon his men in the middle of battle. But you’d be wrong about that, too. The time travel exists so he can meet Kate, and that is all the examination it gets.

Throughout the book, we’re popping back to 1916 France, where Kate is looking for Julian. This hints at some great plot reveal to come, but when it comes, it’s kind of a bust. She finds Julian, they spend three days together, during which she tells him she’s a time traveler and his wife in the fuuuuture and that therefore he can totally sleep with her, and he, a 21-year-old virgin in the middle of a war, leaps on that like a leaping thing and falls madly in love with her.

The entire development of their relationship in the present is based on him having loved her in the past. But—he had a one-night stand with a woman he knew for three days twelve years ago, and that’s the love of his life? I’m amazed he even recognized her when he saw her again. And he says that he’s accumulated all this wealth and bought all these houses for her, thinking of her, so it really is all hers, and because it is time travel! and fate! Kate thinks that’s sweet and not CREEPY AS FUCK. I’m sorry, 21-year-old virgin about to risk his life in battle would fall in love with any woman who’d pop his cherry. You’re not selling me on the time-transcending power of this romance.

And it means that Julian approached Kate in the future with the certainty that future Kate would love him. Kate in the future never actually says I love you, but since she said it in the past, Julian takes it as a given. Which is why he keeps strong-arming her into things, because he knows better than she does how she feels. Which just—that hits so many of my hate buttons I can’t even stand it.

If you remove the LOVE FATED THROUGH TIME, all of Julian’s behaviors make him a bullying, manipulative, creepy stalker. But since Kate is a mind game-playing gold digger, I guess that’s fine, then.

I picked up this book because of the WWI connection. I love the poetry of Wilfred Owen. Wilfred Owen’s poems, particularly his most famous, “Dulce et Decorum Est,” are about ripping away the fantasy of the romance and glory of war and showing the brutal horror of what war actually is. But it says something about the incredible power of that fantasy of war that a book partly inspired by Wilfred Owen would be all fantasy and no brutality at all.

The title of the book, “Overseas,” refers to a poem written by Julian. This poem is central to the plot. First, there’s the problem that Julian ostensibly became a famous enough poet for his poem to be studied in schools based on only one poem published posthumously, which is a little tough to swallow. Owen became famous after his death, but he wrote a lot of poems and was publishing them before he died. But we’ll handwave that, just like we handwave that a soldier from WWI with no training or special insight could be the best hedge fund manager in the world.

The poem does not appear in the book. Ever. The title poem, that the whole plot revolves around, ISN’T IN THE BOOK. A few lines are quoted, but that’s it. I’m going to guess the author didn’t feel she was a good enough poet to write something of the profundity that the character needed to have, but SUCK IT UP. Your 450-page book is about a poem. WRITE THE FUCKING POEM.

At some point, I started thinking about the books I’d rather be reading than the one I was reading. And most of them were horror. Like, Julian fell madly in love with a one-night stand before being yanked out of his time and has devoted twelve years to finding her (starting his search when she was 13, incidentally). When he does, he discovers…she’s not someone he likes at all.

Or I was telling my mom about this book, and she reminded me of Rebecca, which is the antidote to all these billionaire falls in love with ingenue stories. Because Rebecca is what happens afterwards. And it’s a horror story. It shows how awful it is to have your entire social position and worth defined by another person who is rarely there, and to be forced into role you have no idea how to play. God, I need to reread Rebecca.

Or one of my favorite fanfics of all time, now forever and permanently, I’m afraid, a WIP. Resurrection by amari_z. It was about the knights from the movie King Arthur waking up in modern times as part of the once and future king prophecy. And it was all about the conflicts between those who had died young and those who had lived longer. Because the ones who had died young expected the social relationships to be what they were when they died, but those years without them permanently changed the others. So there are factions and plotting and betrayals.

At some point, I realized that Overseas actually had the exact same set up. And missed the enormous fucking opportunity that set up presented to instead spend hundreds of pages on the equivalent of “you hang up,” “no, you hang up.”

Comments

[derryderrydown.livejournal.com]

That was truly, truly beautiful.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

An old historian willed these guys into the future. That’s it

There's your problem right there: this author figured out a dynamite comedy set up and ruined it by writing a romance novel to it instead.

Seriously, that's a great meta/absurdist take on time travel. By rights, the story should have been about the historian being mad that these jumped-up boys were telling him how battles went and ruining his thesis.

[derryderrydown.livejournal.com]

I would read the HELL out of that.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I feel like there are quite a few time travel-as-satire-of-academics books already. Doomsday Book falls somewhat in that category; so does The Gates of Anubis.

My problem is that I essentially want bad fic, only I want it well done. I want the tropes of bad fic, but I want them handled with consideration to all of their potential complications, and do you know how few authors even have an interest in that, let alone are good at it?

[bigscary.livejournal.com]

I was reading this. And then time travel. Wha? Authors: unless you're Marquez, stick with the reality out start with.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

It's a time travel romance. That's what it's billed as, that's what it is. It's a huge subgenre of romance. I have no problem with time travel in a book--it can be one of my favorite tropes. I have a problem with stupid time travel that fails to examine any of its possible complications.

[bigscary.livejournal.com]

I love time travel in a book. But as you say, where it's a time travel/something else book, the time travel should matter. For instance, I hate time travelers wife with a fiery passion, but I don't object to it on these grounds.

If you liked Anubis Gates, read Powers' more recent time travel book. Three Days to Never. It's not at all pleasant, but it's amazing.

[yourlibrarian]

Gah, so many problems! But that fanfic sounds wonderful.