The novel really isn’t this writer’s métier, and The Doctor’s House is not one of her better books.
A family so dysfunctional that it makes the House of Atreus look like the Brady Bunch gradually reveals its secrets in Beattie’s emotionally charged seventh novel, her first since My Life, Starring Dara Falcon (1997).
The story’s told by three narrators, beginning with fortysomething Nina, a freelance copy editor, widowed since her beloved husband’s death from injuries sustained in a car crash, still locked in a tense symbiotic relationship with her brother Andrew, a divorced computer programmer and—like their father (the “doctor” of the title) before him—a compulsive philanderer. When Andrew informs Nina that he’s decided to look up an old (female) high school friend, her thoughts range back to various times during their unhappy childhood, and to Andrew’s several failures (which, back then, seemed to be successes) with women. The ill-judged middle section employs the viewpoint of their (unnamed) mother, whose lachrymose recounting of her victimization by her selfish husband, and her subsequent alcoholism grows quickly tedious and is alleviated only by Beattie’s potent disclosure of the woman’s indifference to her shell-shocked children (“Truth be told, they seemed like two other adults who lived in our house”). Finally, we get Andrew’s version, which succeeds much more fully in depicting an irreversibly damaged psyche, while also telling us a good deal more about the sources and the extent of Nina’s wary withdrawal from other people and obsessive fixation on her brother’s love life. Beattie skillfully avoids the cliché every reader will be expecting, and her portrayal of the coldhearted doctor, a genuine monster of appetite and ego, has a hallucinatory intensity. It’s smartly written, as always, and the dialogue can’t be faulted. And yet . . . one balks at the time spent in the company of these relentlessly unhappy people, suspecting that the situation treated here at novel-length virtually begs to be reshaped within the confines of a typical Beattie short story.
The novel really isn’t this writer’s métier, and The Doctor’s House is not one of her better books.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-1264-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
As she seeks to repair bridges, Cat awakens anger and treachery in the hearts of those she once betrayed. Making amends,...
Before sobriety, Catherine "Cat" Coombs had it all: fun friends, an exciting job, and a love affair with alcohol. Until she blacked out one more time and woke up in a stranger’s bed.
By that time, “having it all” had already devolved into hiding the extent of her drinking from everyone she cared about, including herself. Luckily for Cat, the stranger turned out to be Jason Halliwell, a rather delicious television director marking three years, eight months, and 69 days of sobriety. Inspired by Jason—or rather, inspired by the prospect of a romantic relationship with this handsome hunk—Cat joins him at AA meetings and embarks on her own journey toward clarity. But sobriety won’t work until Cat commits to it for herself. Their relationship is tumultuous, as Cat falls off the wagon time and again. Along the way, Cat discovers that the cold man she grew up endlessly failing to please was not her real father, and with his death, her mother’s secret escapes. So she heads for Nantucket, where she meets her drunken dad and two half sisters—one boisterously welcoming and the other sulkily suspicious—and where she commits an unforgivable blunder. Years later, despairing of her persistent relapses, Jason has left Cat, taking their daughter with him. Finally, painfully, Cat gets clean. Green (Saving Grace, 2014, etc.) handles grim issues with a sure hand, balancing light romance with tense family drama. She unflinchingly documents Cat’s humiliations under the influence and then traces her commitment to sobriety. Simultaneously masking the motivations of those surrounding our heroine, Green sets up a surprising karmic lesson.
As she seeks to repair bridges, Cat awakens anger and treachery in the hearts of those she once betrayed. Making amends, like addiction, may endanger her future.Pub Date: June 23, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-04734-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
This is the sort of book that stirs one so deeply that it is almost impossible to attempt to convey the impression it leaves. It is the story of today's Exodus, of America's great trek, as the hordes of dispossessed tenant farmers from the dust bowl turn their hopes to the promised land of California's fertile valleys. The story of one family, with the "hangers-on" that the great heart of extreme poverty sometimes collects, but in that story is symbolized the saga of a movement in which society is before the bar. What an indictment of a system — what an indictment of want and poverty in the land of plenty! There is flash after flash of unforgettable pictures, sharply etched with that restraint and power of pen that singles Steinbeck out from all his contemporaries. There is anger here, but it is a deep and disciplined passion, of a man who speaks out of the mind and heart of his knowledge of a people. One feels in reading that so they must think and feel and speak and live. It is an unresolved picture, a record of history still in the making. Not a book for casual reading. Not a book for unregenerate conservative. But a book for everyone whose social conscience is astir — or who is willing to face facts about a segment of American life which is and which must be recognized. Steinbeck is coming into his own. A new and full length novel from his pen is news. Publishers backing with advertising, promotion aids, posters, etc. Sure to be one of the big books of the Spring. First edition limited to half of advance as of March 1st. One half of dealer's orders to be filled with firsts.
Pub Date: April 14, 1939
ISBN: 0143039431
Page Count: 532
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1939
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