Response to "Passion" by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

The first thing I immediately noticed about this story is the large amount of telling that Jhabvala does.  I was never unclear what was happening or what a character was feeling, because there were always these lines of "telling" - for example, on page 3, "She stopped herself, for she realized she was saying he was not the sort of person one met." Honestly, I thought the story had a bit too much telling; I understand the notion that the author wants to have the reader know exactly what's happening, but this line in particular stuck out to me (as did several others) as unnecessary. It was clear from the exchange between Betsy and Manny, particularly Betsy's dialogue, why she stopped herself from continuing on with what she was saying.

While there were some instances of the story that bothered me with too much telling, some of it was justified and needed.  I liked the balance between action sequences or dialogue sequences with the telling of how Betsy felt after Manny got drunk that night in particular.  Immediately following their dialogue, there is a whole paragraph about how she felt towards herself for letting Manny get drunk; this paragraph was needed because otherwise, it wouldn't have been clear to me that she blamed herself for Manny getting drunk.  Personally, the majority of the time, when a person gets drunk, I don't blame myself for their actions - so this said a lot about Betsy's character.

Though, from pages 5-8, I was getting really tired of the amount of telling that was going on. I felt like I was reading a summary of a movie on IMDB; no action, no dialogue, just too much telling. I really struggled to get through these pages and to get to the end of the story. If this had been something that I was reading for pleasure rather than for a class assignment, I would have put it down.  I'm glad that I know my taste preferences when it comes to reading though, and that this story further provided me with the knowledge that I prefer action and dialogue in a story, otherwise, I'm just bored with too much summary.  Thankfully, the story picked up again towards the end with the strong dialogue between Manny, Har Gopal, Betsy, and Christine; to me, this was the most interesting part of the story because I finally got to see where all of the telling lines built up, ultimately in order to change the relationships between them.