Sherril Jaffe

Expiration Date by Sherril Jaffe

Following what is presumably a supernatural vision, Flora believes she will die. What follows is Sherril Jaffe’s novel entitled Expiration Date. Flora finds herself in the Heavenly Court where a verdict is passed. She will die in twenty-five years. At the time the announcement is made, Flora is pregnant. The novel follows Flora’s impending date with doom, alternating chapters with her life and that of her mother, Muriel.

Muriel stands in opposition to her daughter’s predetermined death by avoiding a life in a nursing home outside San Francisco. She takes up with a taciturn gentleman named Wilbur, a former pilot who flew missions in Vietnam. Together, they travel from state to state on the bridge circuit. Flora frets about death and listens to the stories her husband, Jonah, a rabbi, tells her.

While the premise is fascinating, the execution remained disappointing. The prose felt inert and the characters remained thin and narratively undernourished. When Flora thinks about death, we find her with her husband as he attends to the pastoral needs of the sick and dying. In the novel, it reeked of authorial obviousness. It lacked subtlety and came across as a character doing too much navel-gazing. Another irking development involved Muriel’s affair with Wilbur. Muriel obsesses about having Wilbur discover her true age, since Wilbur is almost a decade and a half younger than she is. Unfortunately, Wilbur remains nearly silent throughout the time of their relationship. Snippets of background appear in places, but he remains a cipher, less a character than a human lawn jockey.

In the end, the novel just ends. The narrative ramps up anticipation to Flora’s date with death. What happens afterwards is anticlimactic, the slow deflating of the story into a tedious insignificance. Jaffe commits the egregious sin novelists should abhor: she made the novel boring.

http://driftlessareareview.wordpress.com/2011/04/24/expiration-date-by-sherril-j...… (més)

The premise was of this one was intriguing which was why I chose it for one of my Early Reviewer hopefuls. Most people, I suspect, think about what they would do if they knew when they were to 'scheduled' to leave this life. How would one feel if knew you was approaching that fateful day? Would you live your life constantly dwelling on this fact? How would it affect your relationships? At least these are some of the questions I thought as I read the synopsis of Expiration Date. And this is what I thought I would encounter when reading this novel. Did I? The sad fact is, I never found out. I constantly found myself putting it down for days. The story was so boring and the situations so lackluster, it was a struggle. But not one to quickly give up, I kept trying despite the fact that it felt like work to get through just a few pages. This continued for weeks until I asked myself why am I putting myself through this. There are better things out there to read. I read the last few pages and that was that.… (més)

Expiration Date is a story of several related women, their relationships and how those relationships focus on death. Flora, whom you believe the novel is about, had a dream when she was young and pregnant that she would not live to reach her 60th birthday. Her mother Muriel, who is the true focus of this novel, is a “live your life” type of person and balances out her world of depressing daughters, depressing old people, a loss of her husband and several characters this novel contains

What sets Muriel apart from the rest of the world is that she does not seem to care about what the world thinks and is unburdened by the emotional anchors which results from this caring. However, this also makes her a cold character, especially when it comes to her daughters. She is critical of them and they have grown up being intimidated by her. Yet they never acquired the strength to pull away and live their own lives, so one feels little sympathy for them.

The book jacket states that Sherril Jaffe is a professor of creative writing at Sonoma State University. If so, then it must be classes in very basic writing. This story went nowhere, and fast. The lack of passion in this writing is so glaringly evident because the characters are so bland.

It was heartbreaking to read a novel based on nebbeshy, whiny, complaining characters that think of their death or the death of others, of which Muriel herself was also, guilty of being. An example of this obsession with death is the repetition of the scenario of an old woman dying in a nursing home and the next day there would be a line of women with casseroles at the widower’s door. Also, there was the visiting to the state penitentiary to protest, at midnight, the capital punishment sentence of a criminal. No pun intended but this was a little overkill.

If you want to read about the depressing aspects of life (cancer, decrepit old age resulting from just giving up, death of spouses and loved ones, poor familial relationships, death penalties, and pathetic lives void of passion, as well as one due a dream that occurred when the character was younger) and arrive at the end of your reading with no real conclusion, then by all means read this. The writing is weak and the only likable character is Flora’s husband, a rabbi with an “I have no time to think of death because I have a LIFE” attitude. To think, that poor slob has to relate a story from Jewish lore to help aleve his wife’s worry about death.

In conclusion, THERE IS NO CONCLUSION. There was also no plot, little dialogue and the occurrences in these people’s lives were of no interest at all and I didn’t care if Flora died at the end or not. No stars for this work.… (més)