It's hard to talk about this book without discussing the fate of Lucy, David's daughter. To me, her actions are wrong, frustrating, and disturbing - she seems like the archetypal woman doomed to excessively punish herself. There might be a case to be made for what she chooses, solely based on her own definition of dignity, but it's a very difficult one. Perhaps her warped, self-sacrificing behavior is her way of accepting her lot in life, perhaps it’s a result of being raised by an equally warped man and a seemingly distant mother. Perhaps her unwillingness to let her father step in is a result of his original sin - his failure as a patriarch, as a man.

Books aren't bad because they're difficult, and this isn't a bad book. My actual complaint with Disgrace is that at times it felt like a torturous puzzle, kind of like a Haneke movie. Whenever I felt a certain way towards David or some of the side characters, something happened that made me immediately sympathize or be disgusted with them. I know that a lot of life is like this, but as the events keep piling up in the last 30 or so pages, it really began to feel like a moral exercise. Ulitmately, I didn’t like the direction the story went. It felt excessive, but I will give the author credit for not really trying to put an optimistic spin on the story that would probably have read as hokey. A smaller issue I have is that while I liked the harsh, intentionally pretentious(?) à la Lolita writing style, I thought the Byron stuff was much too overwrought for the payoff.

Disgrace makes me feel like such a midwit that I wonder what the point of the book was. I definitely feel much more despair having read it. I'm glad I read it now rather than at any point in the future.