Customer Reviews

Alice in Bed

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This was a book I read a long time ago, and it was one of the first books that I noted didn't follow a set pattern or formula. Alice's affair with the doctor came as a surprise as well as the flirtations with her mother's eccentric boyfriend. This book doesn't disappoint, you feel Alice's pain, the physical pain (laced with appropriate sarcastic remarks) as well as the emotional pain she feels when going from a healthy young woman into a bedridden sour soul, back into an upright citizen. I read this book at least 3 times it was that enjoyable, Alice was a fun character to revisit. A+

For those of us who have been physically impaired and/or very ill, scared to death children in adult bodies, lost in the mad world of medicine, a must read. A stinging and witty critique of being a patient from the inside out. We can feel and identify with her pain, her fatigue, her helplessness and her addiction to pain and dysfunction. Then, vertical once again and walking the world of "healthy" people, we can feel the fear and pain of being "healthy" once again and still being desperately stuck in life in general and wanting to cling to the comfort of illness and hospitals. It will mean a lot, if you've been there. Written like one who's been there and who has the gift of storytelling to spit every syllable back out in plain, human language.

An unusually fresh and astringent comic novel that manages to convey the experience of a terrifying and agonizing illness, as expenienced by a teenage girl, without a hint of cliche. The characters are wonderful, the novel engages the reader on every page. It's sexy and funny and painful.

I've read this book several times and each time I'm struck by it's raw power, delivered with such skilled and playful style that it is all the more effective. It is a book about illness and pain where I don't think the word "anger" is ever used. Alice is a girl we recognize completely but Schine has created her with a fresh perception and gentle wit that in some ways reminds me of Barbara Pym's heroines.

This books pulls you through unwittingly to the end leaving you wondering how you could possibly be finished already. Alice is a 19 year old curmudgeon on the outside with a soul of a lost child on the inside. --- one question --- do doctors really sleep with patients?

Well-written, and good for a book about the mundane daily routines of a hospital patient. Just don't get lured into reading it by the John Updike blurb ("The title evokes another Alice, and in truth our nineteen-year-old heroine does seem to be frequently in Wonderland"). No. Quite simply, no.

I read this book while--yes, indeed--I was sick in bed.
Perhaps that made it all the funnier?

Rarely do we get a narrative voice as honest as Alice in the weird, satiric 'wonderland' of her hospital bed. I didn't realize until after I'd finished the novel, that this was Schine's first novel--in which case it is surprisingly adept and well-written, and Alice as a character wonderfully fleshed-out. Also surprisingly innovative: a look at the world as the world passes by outside the window and in the form of visitors to her bedside (all of whom are peculiar). It could have been dull or improperly paced, but it's not. Despite the humor, you get a perfect sense of the tedium and powerlessness of a patient.

Alice, a teen deprived of her usual health and mobility, begins to retreat into a narrative fantasy world in her own head. This is mediated by her age--the observations and emotional reactions of a very young person are always great fodder for novels, or else we wouldn't have the genre of Bildungsroman. In Alice's case we have an intelligent, snarky college kid faced with the intolerable and the absurd. It makes for good reading.

This mockery of the feelings of the patients and the hospital personnel is annoying and the writing style is boring. I have abandoned it half way, and regret to have bought it (italian edition).