Granted, one can't argue with success, and in that Eat Pray Love is one of those freakish successes that will obliterate any other books that its author dares to publish after it. It will eclipse generations of chick-focused novels over decades to come.
The story is nothing particularly clever or overtly exceptional, but it does nail right what's missing in girls' lives in our desert called contemporary post-modern post-industrial world. Things used to be simple, but now we've realized that we might not have a next life and the flow of information through every crowded space we have causes emotions to flood in forcing us to accept we want more. We're afraid of getting old and dying, because we don't live. We can't live.
This sort of thinking is what causes women like the one in the book to drop everything and just move to Bali.
This sort of self-awareness, or in other words awareness of one's own mortality, is what made me try to sell my car for free just so that I could be free from the responsibility of taking care of it.
School and work and then the screwed up relationships that we tend to engineer our lives into are killing whatever fire we have. I guess this book was focused on women because they seem to be less prone to staying in a situation just for the sake of it.
The problem with the cheesiness of it... namely: three cities and three verbs. Jumping from one relationship to the next and then finding some Brazilian guy who is also divorced and hurting!? This kills whatever possible identification any man could ever create with the characters (probably gay guys too).
Is like searching the Internet for a cool letters generator instead of choosing a new font on Word. Not only a buzzkill, but very likely a dealbreaker. Can't have it. I should write the male version of Eat Pray Love.
The author enjoys storytelling, and thus cannot bear the perception of a perfectly good story being wasted.
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