I enjoyed Slow River. However, I also enjoy The Hills and America's Next Top Model, so this means very little. I enjoyed it, but I didn't think it was particularly good. The major issue I had with it was the apparent lack of a character arc for Lore. As she is the protagonist, I assume we are supposed to identify and sympathize with her; at least, I found no indication to the contrary. I did not particularly like her, however, and there were some major flaws in her character that I thought needed more of a treatment than the book gave.
In the beginning of the story (chronologically), Lore is:
a) mind-blowingly rich, and has all the easy naïve carelessness of the aristocracy
b) mildly obsessed with sex
c) prideful and striving to prove herself to those around her (her family, the company)
d) unthinkingly supportive of the unfair and dangerous monopoly her family hold on the water purification system.
At the end of the novel, she is still all of these things. She has apparently made the most progress in the “mildly obsessed with sex” category – she has at least discovered love, to augment lust. She has plenty of positive characteristics as well, obviously, but the above four were issues I expected to be addressed in her development that were not.
Slow River was unexpectedly pro-corporation. The ethical dilemmas posed by the van de Oest monopoly on the genetically engineered water-purification system are obvious – it allows blatantly artificial price inflation and the eradication of all competition. None of the characters, besides the huddled masses in Venezuela, ever question the rightness of this. We already went over this in class, so I will say no more; more interesting to me is the sense of entitlement and subtle arrogance that Lore displays throughout the book. At her job on Hedon Road, she listens to her superiors speak with a condescending, critical air. After nearly everything Hepple says as he gives her a tour the first day, she mentally disparages him with thoughts like, “I had learned at age 12, from my uncle Willem, that in a properly run plant the average BOD should never be higher than two ppm, but I didn’t say anything” (30) and “[Hepple was] a little tin god, lording it over his tiny domain. He wouldn’t have lasted more than a day on one of my projects” (32). In just these two statements, Lore reminds herself, and the reader, that as an adolescent she already knew better than Hepple, she is connected to the van de Oests, and if she was not in hiding, she would be in control of all her bosses’ fates. With unthinking ease that comes with being of the super-elite, she places herself as superior to everyone else in the plant. Even Magyar has to prove to Lore that she is not a complete idiot.
When Lore tells Magyar her true name, it is with a certain self-satisfied pride. When Magyar reacts with anger, and not awe, Lore thinks, "But I'm Frances Lorien van de Oest! Didn't she know what that meant? She couldn't just dismiss me, as if I were anyone else...But she had. Which is what I wanted, wasn't it - to be treated as a real person?
It is the closest Lore comes to self-reflection.
When I finished reading, I found myself wondering if Lore’s flat character was faulty writing or some kind of extraordinarily subtle criticism of the sheltered elite on Griffith’s part. I think that this is swerving dangerously close to trying to identify author’s intent, so I will not attempt to answer that question; rather, I will only comment that Lore is quite an unusual character in a genre that is so often anti-establishment and subversive.
I don't know, I thought Lore's character progressed by quite a bit throughout the novel, the main developments being her increasingly stronger sense of morality and social consciousness. I think examining her change in attitude toward the failed Venezuela project that cost people their limbs captures her progress well. When Lore is first confronted with the damage that the van de Oest project has caused in Venezuela, she is in her late teens and very indifferent toward the tragic event. While watching the case unfold on televison, she thinks to herself,
"It was not Torini's fault that the locals had tried to cut costs and improve their profit margin by using a generic substitute for the specially tailored van de Oest bacterium around which the whole project had been designed...Mistakes happen, but they can be prevented. Then she turns off the screen, dismissing the matter from her mind. It has nothing to do with her and there is a cold drink waiting in the bar" (page 184).
Contrast this apathy toward the negative effects of the van de Oest company with her repudiation of the family business at the end of the novel (this excerpt is from when Lore meets up with her father again after years of not talking):
"The business carries your name. You're responsible.
I didn't know how to make him understand. I met a man called Paolo, I wanted to say, whose life is ruined because you didn't care enough to oversee the business. The money comes in, and you take it, you don't care how it's made, you don't care that we still rake in tithes on every patent use, that we preside over a monopoly that we don't need anymore. We already have so much money we don't know what to do with it" (page 339).
So, in the end, she's actually pretty disgusted with what the family business has done - I don't think she's that "unthinkingly supportive of the unfair and dangerous monopoly her family hold on the water purification system" with "all the easy naïve carelessness of the aristocracy" because she's very conscious of the damage that has been wreaked by the van de Oest company. She actually explicitly says "...that we preside over a monopoly that we don't need anymore." I mean, yeah, Lore is still far from a perfect person, but I think she deserves some credit for how she has dealt with her past demons. She now has a significantly stronger sense of morality and she definitely feels remorse for all the bad things that she has been a part of in the past.