ENDING

by Hilma Wolitzer ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 31, 1974

Why is it that death -- sudden and violent -- is our favorite spectator sport in books as well as films and that just as surely we avoid the slow-motion dying which is the cancer death? The answer is patently obvious -- no more sad songs which after all might be real and are particularly so in Hilma Wolitzer's Ending, echoing as it does our own uncertainty -- ""When do we become mortal?"" This is a first novel (althouth it is backstopped by considerable short story experience) and it comes closest to Sidney Werkman's Only a Little Time (even if that was not fiction) without the latter's annoyingly favored privilege of circumstance and chin-up courage. Sandy and Jay are also just that young -- with two children -- when Sandy is told that Jay has a soon-to-be-terminal malignancy of the marrow and that he will never leave the hospital where she goes to see him every day. Ordinary scenes -- at a supermarket or a sensitivity session -- reinforce the reality of that world which is now elsewhere. Less ordinary scenes, particularly the one in which she tells Jay the truth (""So this is the whole thing"") are unavoidably painful but somehow, until the end, love has the edge. . . Sandy, unlike Helen Yglesias' shafted How She Died, helps Jay to go gently which gives the book a certain solace denied elsewhere; and since truth and feeling are simultaneously accommodated and served, how can you walk away, uninvolved.

Pub Date: July 31, 1974

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Morrow

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1974

Categories: FICTION