Review by New York Times Review
THE TROUBLE STARTS on the first page. Alice Culvert hurries down a New York sidewalk, carrying her baby and a heavy knapsack, on her way to Thanksgiving in Vermont with its millions of tiny stinging tensions of travel and family. She stops for a coughing fit that brings up blood. Over the next few hours her health will disintegrate under the horrified eyes of her husband, Oliver, until a short time later she finds herself in a hospital in New Hampshire undergoing chemotherapy for leukemia. Charles Bock drops us so abruptly into his new novel, "Alice & Oliver," that the opening pages replicate in the reader the breathless shock of healthy young Alice's sudden illness. "Alice & Oliver" is Bock's second novel, and a very different beast from his 2008 debut, "Beautiful Children." That book was a maximalist epic seemingly written under the influence of David Foster Wallace; today, it feels like a product of its era, with its Las Vegas manufactured from the stuff of adolescent geekery - slot machines, junk food, pornography, cartoonists, pill-popping teenagers, a stripper whose nipples double as candles, even a gruesome scene involving a pregnant cough-syrup-addicted homeless teenager with a clitoral piercing that requires attention. Bock takes a hawk's-eye view of his characters, hovering over one or the other for long stretches, withholding his sympathies from the most obviously sympathetic, like the parents of a lost 12-year-old boy and the unbelievably jerkish 12-year-old himself. Yet he moves the reader with unexpectedly tender portraits of some of the peripheral characters, notably a vampire-like homeless boy called Lestat and Cheri Blossom, the flammable stripper. Bock's new book is more muted, perhaps because it is based on events that actually happened to him and his first wife, Diana Joy Colbert, whose death from leukemia (after a two-and-a-half-year battle) left Bock a single parent of their young daughter. The narrative's medical experience feels dynamic and lived; the book's greatest strength lies in the clarity with which Alice's disease unfolds, and the most touching bits are a series of stand-alone case studies of the patients Alice and Oliver encounter briefly in the hospital. While novelists retain few rights after their books hit readers' hands, the one inviolable right is to never be conflated with anyone in their books, neither characters nor narrators nor speakers. This is true even though readers are often tempted into a kind of reflexive autobiographical sleuthing by the mere existence of author photos and interviews. Bock's book is a fiction - Oliver and Alice are not the reallife Charles and Diana - yet this novel is intended to be read in the light reflected back on it by autobiography. There has been a concerted effort by Bock and his publishers alike to call attention to the facts behind the fiction: in the jacket copy, the acknowledgments, media appearances, and a conversation with the novelist Tom Perrotta that was prominent in advance reading copies and now serves on Bock's website as a reader's guide. "For this novel to be any good," Bock tells him, "I knew it would have to stand up as its own experience. Characters would have to stand on their own feet and have their own organic relationships with one another, form their own connections with a reader." Here readers of "Alice & Oliver" may run into trouble, as the characters often seem to be static accretions of characteristics rather than fully developed people. Alice is defined by her love for her child, some evoked elements of her pseudo-Buddhism (skull beads, mantras, the hippie-dippie healer she imports into the city to lead her in yoga and tisanes), and her professional life in fashion, which manifests for most of the book as a fixation on boots. We don't get to see her as a human being with any depth until the book shifts into Alice's first-person narration, deep in its second half. For his part, Oliver is reduced to humorless smirking and anger, while his back story and career as a software developer are so approximate that one winces to learn that his business is called Generii. And even granting that it's hard to write personality into preverbal babies, it doesn't help that Bock repeatedly likens Alice and Oliver's daughter, Doe, to a doll. The most pivotal element in the book - the relationship between Alice and Oliver - is mainly implied by a series of cringeworthy endearments, the verbal equivalent of a sloppy public display of affection: "Tu esta mi favorito," they say to each other through their tears. It's no spoiler to say there will be infidelity, which has become a reflexive choice for contemporary authors who write about marriage; it is doubly a shame because despite the shopworn plot element, if the characters had felt real, the combination of faithlessness and mortal illness could have had thrilling moral implications. But when characters are sketches with underdeveloped relationships, the losses they experience can't exert an emotional hold on the reader, who can't follow them into their guilt or their bouts of weeping. WHEN A NOVEL is drawn from awful events in the writer's own life, a reviewer can find herself on a wobbly bridge strung between her duty to be honest on behalf of the potential reader, and the ethical imperative to avoid hurting a person who has already suffered so much. The common critical pretense that a book stands alone, divorced from its creator, can only crumble under the autobiographical claim that Bock makes on this text. The audience is being asked to read "Alice & Oliver" two ways, both as fiction and as fictionalized autobiography; but most of the book's emotional work is occasioned not by the text but by the context. This can feel manipulative. Remove the autobiography and the book seems drained, wan, the characters ghosts, the love between them rarely more than shorthand. If many of the aesthetic choices are weary or wearying, Bock's exhaustion is understandable: The effort to write this book must have been overwhelming. It is a novel in the form of a boulder that had been blocking Bock's path, which he has moved only through the painful daily work of writing. "Alice & Oliver" will find its most appreciative audience among people suffering from sudden health crises who want to feel less alone in their terror and confusion; it will be dear to anybody who loves Charles Bock, who surely needed to write it. But as a writing teacher of mine once said, very gently, to a student who handed in work formed out of the rough stuff of her life, "That it happened doesn't make it true." By this, she meant that good fiction comes out of the author's artistry. The real things to celebrate with the publication of "Alice & Oliver" are Bock's superhuman efforts to write a story that must have seemed so large it blocked out all of the light, and all of the books in this talented author's future that are now free to come into view.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 3, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Best-selling Bock (Beautiful Children, 2008) presents a nail-biting suspense novel that plunges headfirst into a terrifying circumstance that sends a beautiful, vibrant young mother's life into a tailspin. The villain is cancer. Its prey, Alice Culvert, is still nursing the infant daughter that both she and husband Oliver adore. As a fashionista and a tech entrepreneur living in a loft in a pre-gentrified West Village neighborhood during the mid-1990s, this couple is très trendy and deeply in love. They are in that enchanting honeymoon phase of brand-new parenthood, and the last thing they expect is to grapple with mortality. Maybe worse, if not at least more challenging, than the concept of mortality is dealing with the idiosyncrasies of the American health-care system. Bock doesn't pussyfoot. The story inspired by his own experience when his young wife was diagnosed with leukemia bares all, from routine annoyances and major frustrations to the caring, competent professionals and staff who operate within a flawed system. The characters of Alice and Oliver are flawed, too, but also loving and memorable. Bock tells a tale that holds a penetrating mirror to our worst fears in a way that fascinates even as it frightens.--Chavez, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
"Cancer is a hell of a disease," Alice and her husband, Oliver, are told by a doctor early on in Alice's diagnosis in this articulate excavation of the emotional, physical, and intellectual effects of terminal illness. Through this novel, Bock (Beautiful Children) has, by and large, translated much of his own experience of tending to his late wife-who, like Alice, was diagnosed with leukemia when their daughter was an infant. The result is a spellbinding book, pulsating with life and reminding the reader on every page that even when everything is as awful as it could possibly be, life itself is always a curious thing. Interspersed throughout the first two-thirds of the novel are occasional "Case Studies," detached profiles of fellow patients receiving chemo, which provide a formal, almost surreal counterbalance to the intense humanity of Alice's sickness. Though it could have been worthwhile, this device peters out before it can add much depth. But overall, this book overcomes the standard clichés to provide a beautiful, complex portrait of a family in crisis. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Readers will fall in love with Alice -Culvert from the moment she bounces onto the page, baby strapped to her chest, cotton skirt swirling around her knee-high leather boots, and coffee in her hand. Strong yet vulnerable, she's a woman on a mission, and when she convulses in a wet, nerve-wracking cough, Bock (Beautiful Children) envelops us in a sense of foreboding. Through the eyes of those who care for Alice-husband Oliver, best friend Tilda, take-charge mom, and various New Age gurus-a picture emerges of a woman powered by a ferocious love for her daughter who refuses to be cowed by a leukemia diagnosis and pending bone-marrow transplant. Bock does not shy away from the horrible indignities concomitant with Alice's treatments, circa 1993 and a world away from today's latest protocols. Most impressive is the way the author deals so forthrightly with Oliver's difficult role as caretaker, juggling his own needs with those of his wife, his child, and his fledgling business. VERDICT Informed by his own wife's illness and death, Bock's novel is a searingly honest, wryly funny, deeply loving tribute to those facing mortality and struggling through the maze of health insurance and treatment options while trying to hold on to their humanity. [See Prepub Alert, 10/26/15.]-Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A literary novel about cancer and the way a husband and wife try to survive. Alice is sick. Leukemia. She and her husband, Oliver, once lived in the New York world of "important gallery openings, industry parties, [and] runway shows," but no longer; now, they navigate chemo and health care and fret about their young daughter growing up without a mother. Alice and Oliver decide to approach the situation with, as they put it, blinders on, trying only to handle each new day. A good strategyuntil it drives them into their own heads, breaking down communication and isolating them from each other. Heavy stuff, and Bock (Beautiful Children, 2008) understands his material well, as he went through this sad experience with his own wife. In a way, this novel feels critic-proof: who would dare nitpick a work of such authorial catharsis? Stories that use illness as the primary plot engine can invite skepticism. Every reader inherently sympathizes, so the author may have to do less work on the nuance end of things. But Bock's real act of genius is to start with the cancer, to develop his characters in the shadow of the diagnosis, and then, as the book goes on, to grow the story around the cancer; as family and friends begin showing up to provide sympathy (Alice is skeptical: "All these people got to feel a little better about themselves, and feel sorry for her, and then leave and go on with their normal lives"), we learn more about Alice and Oliver, about their lives. The illness doesn't interrupt humanity; humanity grows from the illness, which is a narrative strategy that makes the book one of the most moving in recent memory. A stunning book about Alice and Oliver, yes, but also about the way illness shatters us all. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
