the 'diss' in the dissident

When words have enveloped you and yet stayed non-committal, you tend to remember what you were reading. Nell Freudenberger's Lucky Girls, a short story I stumbled across, a coupla years ago, about a girl in a situation (well, read it!), was everything you hope, wish (and in hindsight, pray) for a short story to be. You could see the house, hear the characters, listen in on the protagonist's thought process, and be all 'negative capability' like with the female narrative (Screw you, feminists, I'm calling it that! And why is a woman an actor, while we're on the subject?!). There was guilt in Lucky Girls, melancholy, fleeting happiness, and other familiar twists and head-on collisions. And all of this happened within those many pages that maketh a comfortable short story... And so it goes. Or rather, went. That I made the proverbial beeline for the Nell novel, The Dissident, in the Ed Room here, that's always bursting with books. (Believe me, sometimes, that ain't a good thing). I couldn't wait to plunge into good fiction (know that craving?), a debut by someone who had done all that (see above). And tempted fate with a title like Lucky Girls. And retrospect (precious, bites you in the ass later, retrospect) tells me I'd tempted fate myself with the expectations.The only diss in the dissident is disappointing. It has (had) such potential in premise, such anticipation in storyline, so much promise in just the landscape, that it kind of failed to take off. A malfunction that did not say, 'All systems go'. But Nell thought she could push it still.What she didn't manage, though, is to pull it off.PS: More disappointment with music follows soon. Waddya do when music and books diss ya?! Huh? Kill me. I mean, tell me...