Review by Booklist Review
Beattie is acclaimed for her short stories, for which she received the 2000 PEN/Malamud Prize, and her gift for incisive psychological portraiture remains undiluted in her novels. Her newest, in fact, demands the same uninterrupted concentration as a short story, so intensely wrought are its emotional and sexual complexities, so hard hitting is its exposure of the enigma at the heart of every psyche. The familial tale is told in three magnetic yet not entirely trustworthy voices by the survivors of a demonic doctor's harrowing household. Nina has always been close, possibly aberrantly so, to her brother, Andrew, although she did marry and taste happiness until an accident turned her into a reclusive widow. She is nearly nunlike, while her divorced brother is desperately promiscuous, as was their late, wildly irrational, and cruel father. As Andrew compulsively searches out and attempts to seduce girls he knew in high school, his betrayed lovers, stunned by his coldness and in need of a confessor, make their way to Nina's door, and she listens, just as her mother, who narrates the third unsettling section, endured the painful disclosures of women outraged by her loutish husband. Is it true, as Andrew contends, that "no adult ever forgets the struggles of adolescence" ? Are he and Nina helplessly reenacting their parents' tortured lives? Beattie involves her readers so deeply in each narrator's subjective viewpoint that it's a challenge to glean the truth, lending this sad yet strangely noble study of the insidious natures of delusion, habit, fear, and loneliness an aura of almost sacred mystery. Donna Seaman
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Beattie continues to prove herself one of our best contemporary writers of short stories, but she has rarely managed to attain the same level of achievement in her novels. Though her ability to make an ordinary situation completely fascinating is intermittently on display in her latest full-length effort, the contrived anglings of the plot ultimately sink this composite portrait of three family members linked by the traumatic events of their past. Siblings Nina and Andrew survived neglect and outright cruelty their mother was an alcoholic and their father was a sadist and a philanderer by banding together. Now Nina is a copy editor living in Cambridge, Mass., still grieving over the loss of her husband, who was killed in an accident. She has her hands full with the volatile, immature Andrew, who has been looking up women he knew in high school for a rather bizarre serial-sexual high school reunion. As much as she would like to be left alone, she is forced into the role of counselor to several of his conquests. The narration shifts briefly to Nina and Andrew's mother, who talks about her marriage to the tyrannical doctor and her difficulty connecting to the children, but mostly she indulges in "self-serving re-creations of her past." Andrew narrates the final section, offering his take on his family and the women he has been pursuing. What all three have in common is a hatred for the monster they once lived with. Unfortunately, the parallels of the siblings to the parents Nina marries a doctor and later becomes withdrawn and bitter, Andrew is sexually compulsive seem facile and, while the cumulative effect of their anecdotes is chilling, it's hard to feel much sympathy, since their gossip, self-pity and self-deception undermine the trauma. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Beattie celebrates winning the 2000 PEN/Malamud Prize by publishing this tale of a mousy copyeditor obsessed with her brother's sex life. (c) Copyright 2010. 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 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 cliche 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 metier, and The Doctor's House is not one of her better books.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
