The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert (2013)

Rating: ⭐ Like your drunk uncle's monologue at Thanksgiving dinner, I kept waiting for The Signature of All Things to become more profound or even more interesting.

It did not.

Great expectations abound for this book since it boasted tremendous endorsements by journalistic titans and is authored by the same woman who penned the widely renowned Eat, Pray, Love. Unfortunately, this book's tumble from my (arguably high) expectations is certainly something to lament. There were maybe only 3-5 things I appreciated in this 499-page book. Despite lofty descriptions and soaring claims the book's back-cover summary provided, I was sorely disappointed.

The book promises to be "radiant...a big, panoramic novel about life and love" and "the novel of a lifetime". It was voted as a Best Book of the Year by Time, The Oprah Magazine, The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post.

Shockingly, I found it to be more about a painstaking study of moss, begrudging familial duty, and a middle-aged woman sulking in a moldy Tahitian hut. Rest assured, dear reader, I did my best to see whatever these endorsers were talking about; I could not. I cannot recommend this book unless you are a fan of Charles Dickens' prose and care a lot more about moss than I do. But, if you're curious why I found it so ridiculous, do read on.

SPOILERS TO FOLLOW

SPOILERS BELOW

Overview:

This was a bewildering tale where we traversed the world with Alma Whittaker on her life's strange and somewhat pointless journey. She didn't particularly learn anything by the end of it. I felt like Alma was who she's always been- morose, self-absorbed, and staunchly scientific. From 1800 to 1883, she did mostly the same things her entire life- study moss and complain about her lack of companionship that she did little to correct.

Characters:

There were a few interesting characters in this novel, yet they were usually the ones we spend the least amount of time with. I'll save you some time; the only interesting characters are Retta, The Hiro Contingent, and Tomorrow Morning. As for the rest, Alma is bafflingly irritating for 500 pages, Prudence is self-righteous and frustrating, and Ambrose is missing a few marbles.

Tomorrow Morning:

Yes, his name is Tomorrow Morning. As a character, he was written in an confidently enigmatic person. He was narcissistic and imposing but in the most gentle and unassuming way. He described himself as a conqueror, but was loved by literally everyone. With such a curious character dynamic, I wanted to know more about this guy, but his part in the story was fleeting. I believe it should have been expanded on.

The Hiro Contingent:

The most interesting group of characters was what Alma dubbed "the Hiro contingent"- a group of orphaned, feral ten-year-olds who spent their time throwing mud at each other, roasting various animals on spits, passing out in the sand every night, and traversing the island in endless play. It was hilarious imagining them confidently showing a 50-something white lady around the Tahitian jungle, pushing her up cliffs, and dutifully helping her search for the elusive man in Ambrose's sketches for several months. I honestly would have rather read a book about them.

Retta Snow:

Retta was also a flighty, fascinating character. She seemed like a beautiful person and I wanted to see more of the way she saw the world. As a young girl she was funny and full of life. She didn't seem to completely conform to society in the best way. But we didn't get a lot about her life as an adult. Retta quickly slipped into madness after her marriage to Prudence's secret love, George, and was left drooling in the mental hospital for the rest of the novel until her death. Her life was totally unremarkable.

Alma Whittaker:

Next, Gilbert spends several hundred pages discussing the bewildering life of her main character, Alma Whittaker. As a girl, she was raised for intellectual excellence with an immovable scientific mind. As a young woman, she makes an impromptu discovery of salacious books when sorting through the library and makes increasingly frantic trips to the book binding closet for personal exploration (to put it politely). A lot of time was devoted to discussing this peculiar character trait. To be frank, it was weird and felt unnecessary to her development. Then, in a single chapter, she suddenly went from a 20 year old girl to a 48 year old woman with seemingly nothing interesting to report for the last two decades of her life except an all-encompassing study on the mosses of North America. Seriously?

Alma is snubbed by love on a few occasions but then makes no effort to find a real life partner and is upset by this for the rest of the novel. She goes on a ridiculous quest to Tahiti to learn pointless answers about her dead, homosexual husband. There, she has every opportunity to learn and grow but does nothing important for several years. When she finally gets some unsurprising answers from Tomorrow Morning about Ambrose, she leaves for Amsterdam, writes a mammoth evolutionary theory she never publishes, and studies moss until the end of her days. Alma Whittaker does not grow or change. There were at least two separate moments where she realized something important about herself or life but sadly, it felt like Gilbert did nothing with those revelations and left her character to wither. There was so much missed opportunity to give Alma life and dimension.

Ambrose Pike:

Alma's tragic husband was a strange character. He wished "to commune with angels" and see God in plants. Gentle and curious, Ambrose's mind fascinated Alma and she was interested in how he saw the world. Upon his physical rejection of her after their wedding however, Alma unceremoniously ships him off to Tahiti to perish alone. He was often described as a beautiful and delicate person who was always hurt by the harsh world that couldn't accept him. This proved to be true. Ambrose Pike was not meant for reality it seemed; he was a creature all his own.

Prudence Whittaker:

The adopted daughter of Henry Whittaker, Prudence spend her whole adolescence trying to improve herself to be on par with Alma's fortuitous mind. She was usually described as possessing doll-like beauty, but because of the unwanted attention, she did her best to not show any emotion ever. She was cold, seemingly uncaring, and annoyingly self-righteous in her selfless ways. She gave up the man she loved in hopes that Alma could marry him, but that didn't work out so she spent her entire life with a wet-dish-towel of a husband where they chose to live in poverty in solidarity for the Abolitionist movement. Prudence showed cracks in her perfect image, but she read like a robot for most of the novel. I honestly wish we could have gotten more of her internal story, but that was a let-down too.

Notable Positives:

Gilbert's writing is lovely, striking, vivid, and pleasantly palatable. I did like the interesting settings we got to explore, those were refreshing and surprising. On several occasions, I found myself lulled into a tranquil traipsing through the author's carefully curated world. Only the story was so bad, I would suddenly look up and wonder what on earth was the point of the last forty pages. I was bewildered and confused on where I, as the reader, was going. But, I'm a completionist by all accounts, so I strapped in and forged my way to the end.

There were at least three really beautiful and/or powerful moments in the book when I held my breath for hope. It was immediately dashed but the moments were still really well done.

• The first is when Alma in her middle age realized she's been incredibly selfish and sheltered her whole life. It's a remarkable moment when there was every opportunity for character growth and I loved to see it, despite it being squandered.

• The next is a touching moment between Alma and Prudence where we see them love each other as sisters for the first and last moment of their lives. This too went nowhere but it was a touching scene.

• Finally, there was a powerful moment when Alma heroically bursts from the water, deciding to live intentionally and with purpose after being almost crushed by aggressive women playing a carnal game of ball. Still, nothing is done with this revelation, but I thought the powerful moment was worth mentioning.

The Ending:

The ending was neither interesting nor unexpected. Alma got old, she didn't die in the last pages, but it's understood she will very soon. She just rests with her face against an old tree and that's where we leave her. For real. That's it. Felt lackluster and didn't offer much of interest, especially after sticking with it for 499 pages.

Final Thoughts:

I would not recommend you read this book. It was irritating, long-winded, and felt altogether pointless. Elizabeth Gilbert's writing style is pretty, some of the characters were interesting, and the settings were lovingly built. Unfortunately, the plot itself and it's annoying main character were the worst I've read in a while. I was relieved to put it away.

If anyone out there found something profound in this novel, please let me know in the comments so I can stop feeling like I wasted my time!

P.S.

If you really want to read my rant:

(Here's a more detailed summary of Alma's weird life because it was all so very strange and I just have a lot of thoughts.)

Alma is snubbed by love and watches both her sister, Prudence, and their childhood friend, Retta, get married- the latter to her childhood crush, George, which was quite disappointing. She resigns herself to a lonely existence of science and moss, claiming she would be smarter than any man she may court and thus would be deemed unmarriable. (Right.)

As fate would have it, a husband in the form of a 30-something orchid illustrator arrives to Alma's estate. She is taken with his scientific mind and his flouncy ideas and quickly marries him. This proves disastrous, as she soon realizes he desires a chaste marriage because he bats for the other team. Her sexual desires still unsatisfied and her pride wounded, she ships him off to the failing vanilla plantation in Tahiti to dispose of her mistake. Ambrose dies there after a few years and this fact, along with her self-imposed loneliness, sends her into a deep depression. After going though his suitcase, she finds some very intimate drawings of a young Tahitian man. Shortly after, her father dies, she divvies out the estate to her sister's Abolitionist cause, and endeavors to sail across the world on some hairbrained mission to find this random sketched man to ask him what the nature of his relationship was to her husband. This is all simply for the need to understand Ambrose more because she now feels bad for banishing him to his tropical death.

After a long sea voyage, Alma finds herself living in a gross little hut in Tahiti where her husband recently died. All her possessions were immediately stolen and she survives by the mercy of the eccentric, yet endlessly happy missionary, Reverend Welles. Despite the character-building setting, Alma mostly spends her time there moping around, wondering what Ambrose looked at, touched, or experienced. She doesn't learn much and spends years obsessing over finding the man in Ambrose's drawings. It's honestly an absurd quest.

When the man she's been searching for suddenly shows up from a neighboring island, she confronts him. The man wants to take her on a day trip to discuss his time with her husband. He takes her to the most exquisite moss cave she's ever seen and tells her everything she wants to know. None of it is all that surprising and the fact that Alma, the person who cares about mosses more than anyone in the world, gets to have all her questions answered in the most beautiful moss cave anyone as ever seen felt forced and trite. The subsequent scene between her and Tomorrow Morning in this perfect moss cave is weird, absurd, and unrealistic. I don't even want to go into more detail than that. Ugh.

Her stupid, years-long quest satisfied, Alma decides she's done living in squalor on Tahiti and sails for Amsterdam to live with her maternal uncle who conveniently runs a botanical conservatory. While sailing, she basically writes Darwin's Theory of Evolution. Never publishes it because she can't explain how selflessness fits in to evolution. She then gets a job, shockingly, as the Curator of Mosses, and spends the next twenty years doing exactly what she'd been doing from age 20 to 48. Except this time, she gets to enjoy spending time with her uncle's family and her grand-niece. It truly felt like nothing changed for 300 pages.

Finally, when she's like 80-something, she invites over this scientist, Alfred Wallace, a friend of Charles Darwin, and whose work she'd been carefully following for years. They discuss their similar evolutionary theories and ask each other what the point of it all is. Wallace, an atheist, says we have complex minds to reach and commune with the intelligent creator of the universe some day (because that makes sense, coming from him) and Alma says we make up an afterlife to comfort ourselves. Both of these ideas are not new nor are they profound. They're certainly not surprising answers from two highly scientific minds. It's all lackluster.

Finally Alma sends Wallace to bed, and she starts to amble towards the conservatory's moss cave to consider their conversation. But she's in her eighties and gets tired so she stops to rest. She doesn't die, just sits down and puts her face against an old tree. That's literally it. That's the ending I wasted hours of my life for.