March 18, 2008
Recent Reading: The Pursuit of Alice Thrift
Over the years, I've read one or two books by Elinor Lipman but have by no means kept up with her fairly prolific output. I am definitely attracted to her quirky characters and the fact that most of the books are very fast reads--an afternoon or so--that don't require a long-term commitment on my part.
Today I read The Pursuit of Alice Thrift, another book full of oddball characters. A surgical intern in Boston, Alice Thrift's parents believe she suffers from undiagnosed Aspberger's Syndrome because she is long on intelligence and short on social skills. When a man nearly 20 years Alice's senior begins to pursue her romantically, Alice's only two friends and her parents strongly object to the pairing. The question is: Is Ray Russo really the huckster he appears to be? From the opening pages, the reader knows that Alice marries Ray and that the marriage doesn't last past the honeymoon. It propelled me to find out what happened.
Lipman chose to tell this story in first-person from Alice's point of view, which seems an interesting choice to me, to tell the story from someone who might appear to be emotionally too close to the story to be objective. Then, Lipman introduced the Aspberger's angle, which made me wonder which came first, the Aspberger's or the point of view. Whichever the case, the potential Aspberger's Syndrome gives Alice the necessary detachment to tell an unmuddied story.
So from Alice and her odd bedside manner--she does learn over the course of the book--to her promiscuous male-nurse roommate to her unapologetically adulterous neighbor to a great support cast of personality quirks, The Pursuit of Alice Thrift made for a pretty good afternoon of reading.
Rita Diane Devlin
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