Friday

"People who are busy and happy don't write diaries; they are too busy living."

We begin with a spy thriller in medias res, segue into a series of mildly suggestive quasi-sexual encounters, fly on supersonic jets, praise cats, sneak across some borders, more canoodling, some vague kvetching about economics and multiple currencies, win a lottery, maybe get back to that spy stuff at some point...? Maybe. Oh, and clairvoyance. Spaceships! And did we mention genetic engineering? Lots of punching, at any rate. Plus a space elevator! In bed!

I had avoided Heinlein's Friday until now because his last few books (excepting the excellent Job) were a bit dodgy, and the basic premise of "sexy superspy" seemed too blatantly riding the Cold War spy thriller craze. Comments from people who had read it (like "I don't know what he was trying with Friday") certainly didn't help, and pretty much any review will comment on its disjointed lack of narrative.

 

After a full read, I would guess that in format, Heinlein was likely emulating picaresque novels, a style influential yet largely outgrown by modern storytelling and our greater awareness of causality and plot progression. Compounding that, some of the heroine's convenient lucky breaks (admitted as such toward the end) only make sense as contrivances to fit Friday into Heinlein's latter-career "world as myth" books, as interventions by his time traveler brigade. Also, you can see the ending's general shape forty pages into a novel pushing four hundred, and though a good enough ending, it only emphasizes the gratuitously circuitous route to reach it.

 

You're left with the title character herself to reflect on those by-roads' significance, but she simply does not change enough, does not learn enough, does not contemplate enough to lend the events relevance. The whole point of a picaresque protagonist as I understand it is watching a clever, relatable yet somewhat contemptible bottomfeeder slither through society's cracks, and this simply does not mesh with Heinlein's general style, in which heroes simply KNOW BETTER THAN YOU and aren't afraid to bloviate about it. Simply put, he strained too hard to make Friday sympathetic and superior for her travails to truly connect, and the way half the cast rematerialize as accessories to her denouement clinches it.

Weirdly, the book might've read better stretched out to a sequel to allow each individual episode proper development and contextualization. As it stands, episode after episode are dropped in as set pieces, many of them lifted from previous works and just as quickly dropped. One glaring example would be the interjection of space distance calculations as in Have Spacesuit - Will Travel, there befitting its teen hayseed's sense of wonder yet here clashing with the technically adept and worldly superspy. Too much of Friday gives the impression of The Author merely playing the role of himself, impulsively aping his own style with no end in sight.

Yet still... maybe not... maybe... that ending. For those who've had to tightwire between freedom and isolation, for those stranded by their own transcendence, for alien, alienated half-men, it cannot help but twinge.