Fiction

I just read a novel that had no point I could see except to weave a tale.  I thought, beforehand, that I'd enjoy a book like that.  And I did.... but it was like food without enough salt; I kept missing something.  It was a story of a girl who falls in love the summer before starting college, gets pregnant her senior year during a one night stand with someone else, has the baby, and eventually marries the man she was originally in love with (not the baby's father).  Her love story, her decisions about the baby, her struggles to make a life for herself with a baby and to cling to hope that there could be a future for her with the man she loves after she's betrayed him, were fairly well developed and interesting.  But it seemed to be art in imitation of life - or maybe of art.  I felt like the girl's voice didn't mature much during the course of the 7 years the book covers, and that at each stage the background of her life and motives were based mostly on stereotypes:  independence from family in high school, diving into the party scene in college, pursuing excitement (while supporting herself and her baby) after she graduated.

Somehow I've always thought that novelists wrote to play God, or to imitate or honor him; to show what choices lead to what consequences, who wins and who loses, in a world where they have absolute control.  This novel read more like the 5 o'clock news:  there was no meaning; only events.  But the book won several awards, and how I'd like to understand what's behind that.  Perhaps there was more there than I saw...  And if not, how do I feel about a novel written just to entertain?