The View Was Exhausting by Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta
Review of The View Was Exhausting by Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta
“Leo had accelerated her career like nothing else, and she liked him, very much. She did not want to ruin everything by loving him.”
The View was Exhausting by Mikaella Clements & Onjuli Datta (2021). Published by Grand Central Publishing.
This was a book I just happened to stumble upon, because this is way outside of my comfort zone. I usually don’t read things that are often classified as chick lit, and this became increasingly obvious to me as I kept reading through The View Was Exhausting. I found this book to be quite exhausting, to be honest, because I found myself frustrated with the content and wanted more depth from it. There was so much untapped potential!
Anyways, I don’t think I’m used to something that is completely and utterly contemporary. Our main character name drops the Met Gala, Vogue Magazine, a brand partnership she has with Chanel. I have a major fear of mentioning things that are clearly, say 2021, because it doesn’t age well. I don’t think this book will age well. It will show insights into a time in which social media and paparazzi are rampant, as well as a general overview of celebrity and acting culture.
I’ve ranted quite a bit already, so let’s dive into this review.
Content
Our main character in this novel is Whitman Tagore, often dubbed Win as a short form of her name. Her father was an English teacher and named her after Walt Whitman, but her father tragically died of cancer when she was young, leaving her alone with her mother Pitha. Pitha is a Bengali immigrant to London, but Wit didn’t really grow up with Bengali culture. Pitha didn’t take her back to Kolkata when Wit’s father died because she wanted to support her daughter’s acting career, even if she didn’t understand it.
Outside of the plotline where her mother gets breast cancer and Leo must come offer his sympathies at their home, we don’t get a lot of them mending their relationship with each other. Win’s and Pitha’s relationship is very strained, but we honestly don’t see any of it developed during our time with the characters in the novel. This particularly frustrated me, because the novel deals with racism in the acting industry and drama caused by her mother’s existence, but then nothing actually comes out of this relationship.
Our main focus of this novel was the relationship between Leo and Win. Win didn’t grow up privileged, but Leo is the definition of privileged. He’s the son of a tycoon, an ex-supermodel, and now owns a bunch of art galleries. They’ve apparently been best friends for seven years, but have had sex at one point and are loyal to each other to the point in which they will consistently pretend to date each other. Which the press has loved, although they’ve demonized Win for being an Indian woman and Leo (who is white) is hailed as a golden boy of society. These two have insanely good chemistry, but this plot line gets hijacked when it’s discovered Leo has been secretly married to the lead singer of an indie band.
Which then exposes a lot of the problems I found in this novel. What kind of plot twist is the fact he’s been secretly married this entire time? For someone whose life is very public, is supposedly married to someone equally public about their life and can’t seem to keep a secret, and for being Win’s quote-on-quote best friend, this doesn’t seem believable at all. It also is incredulous about how Win controls her image to the point where she fakes looking sick of grief and makes fake hospital visits to keep up her image. To be honest, I didn’t feel sympathy when she got exposed for that, because her life was literally a lie. She needed a wakeup call, especially in the era of authenticity.
This book also gets really boring after it’s revealed that he’s married. It’s the same argument over and over again between the two of them, then, what a shocker, they get together. This reads like a soap opera gone wrong, like an attempt at a telenova. I thought that there was so much untapped potential in this novel, especially when you have a main character that’s Bengali-British and is an up and coming Hollywood starlet. It seems like racism is just an inconvenient thing in this novel, something mentioned in passing, when I wanted to see Wit combating these stereotypes and narratives. But she’s too sterile, sticking to the clean narrative that won’t get her cancelled and gets her the roles.
It was really refreshing though to get this representation. Win is a scrappy girl from London who’s willing to roll a cigarette and has a tough relationship with her living immigrant parent. She was the most relatable character in a sea of characters all of wish we could be, but, perhaps, that’s the appeal of chick lit. Watching the scrappy immigrant girl get a rich white boy whose daddy owns a shit ton of property.
Overall Thoughts
I couldn’t tear away my eyes from this novel and found it somewhere within myself to finish it. Did I love it? No, not really. The writing itself is fine, but it felt like Gen Z culture to the max and a fever dream that someone wishes they were in. I dub this as escapism lit, something you read when you want to wish you were some celebrity dating the it boy, because that’s what Win does. Her story isn’t easy, she struggled to get where she’s at, but it felt slightly not genuine, something forced. It might not be my cup of tea, but I’m sure there’ll be people who will love this kind of story.
