What the hell.....we did claim in our "about me" hoo-hah that we read and watch everything.....of course, we also originally planned to boast of winning the Pulitzer, the Nobel Prize and a Golden Globe. just to see if anyone was paying attention. But we swear, the part about us reading any book and sitting through any movie still holds......
Something's clearly gone awry in the Nicolas Sparks empire, built on a foundation of easy-reading novels about various tragically damaged people who find redemption, everlasting love or fatal diseases, accidents and murders. Whether these star-crossed souls make it to the last page still breathing depends, we guess, on Sparks's mood while he's writing. In the Sparks-iverse, you might end up happily with the love of your life......or stand pining over their gravestone.
Hollywood studios, for a time, regularly scooped up Sparks books for film adaptations.....and for a time, the skillfully done ones like "A Walk to Remember" and "The Notebook" connected deeply with their audiences, who wept into their butter popcorn....
But artistically and financially, the returns diminished. The films turned clumsy, stale, poorly cast with actors who barely committed to the heart-squeezing Sparksian theatrics required of them.....the movies came and went within a week, which the studios finally took notice of.......
Sparks himself went through a divorce and that seemed to lead to an alteration of his formula....."See Me", his previous novel, had him attempting an unlikely blend of his standard tropes with a suspense thriller. "Two By Two" abandons his patented romantic melodramatics altogether.....it's simply an excruciatingly long, drawn out tale of a weak-willed advertising man starting up his own business and caring for his young daughter while his toxic ultra-bitchy wife-from-hell leaves him for a new job and another man.
Redundant to the point where you can skim 50 pages at a clip and not miss anything, the book tests your patience with its limp noodle lead character, his cardboard harpy wife, and the extended agonized cancer battle of the ad-guy's beloved lesbian sister. We respect the right of authors to work out their demons in their books......but in this slow-motion, soap-opera-ish detailing of a crumbling marriage, Sparks not only punishes himself but his faithful readers as well.
By the time "Two By Two" limped to its finish, the paltry insights that Sparks gleaned out of all this epic misery didn't seem worth the amount of time we spent reading it. And come to think of it, all of Sparks plot resolutions here, meant to give you a warm, huggy feeling, rang false, far fetched and not for one moment believable.....
Overall, a sour, boring experience from a pop culture novelist who used to pluck readers and moviegoers heartstrings like a concert pianist virtuoso. We'd advise hardcore Sparks-aholics to pass on this one and wait till he gets his mojo back.....BQ can shed only one brief tear (*).....you're better off waiting for new episodes of "This Is Us".....
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