Customer Reviews

Better Than Sane: Tales from a Dangling Girl

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

 

 

As a longtime admirer of Alison Rose's pieces in The New Yorker, her Talk of the Town stories and profiles, over many years, I am so happy she has written Better than Sane: Tales from a Dangling Girl, a book that I love. I read it in one sitting. There is a nobility about Rose's story, a life spent in search of a direction for her singular and considerable gifts. When Rose writes about the characters whom she loves and who love her back, she writes with such style and wit and self-awareness that many of her sentences will stay with me for a long, long time. A
great chapter is a road trip that Alison and her mentor and friend, George, take through the South. It made me cry. Another favorite is a romantic and sexy description of an affectionate lover: "It seemed to me he brought the highest reverence -- a sort of tactile worship -- to being up close to another person." If any reader has doubted herself, she will find comfort and reassurance in Alison Rose's spectacularly well-written first book.

I usually only review books that I absolutely love- but in this case I wanted to read this tome in one night and be done with it... Alison has a beautiful and sometimes seductive and brilliant way of stringing thoughts together- an idiosyncratic way of descriptive device. Five stars for individuality and fine form.
The issue that I think most detractors have is the content and viewpoint of this clearly unfeminist female who in current jargon "gave all of her power away" to captivating and famous intellectuals - and I agree it's unclear the extent of the physical affairs that she was having - although there was plenty of mind games and heady flirtation and this was the food of her life- approval from men .So, if it's not your bag then you probably won't like the book-The men seem pompous smug and peurile to me, but I wasn't there. Everyone has their own life to live and Alison Rose shouldn't be judged to harshly for her choices. Certainly the game was a two way street and these New yorker men loved having their err egos stroked.To readers I say "try it , you might like it, and if not then she's just not your cuppa. "

Alison Rose is a real writer. Better Than Sane:Tales from a Dangling Girl is literature, which is hard to come by these days.
Rose knows what friendship is. I have memorized a sentence she wrote about the writer Harold Brodkey: "If I have, say, twenty fragments of my mind all to myself, and I give ten to Harold, then half of them are taken care of for a few hours. Then I have only half the trouble, half the isolation. A real luxury." In the chapter "Dangling Girl," Rose's loyal friend Francine flies in from Atlanta to help Alison pack up her office at The New Yorker. The description is sad and charming and so beautiful that I could feel the decades of friendship, as if I had been in the office with them. On the last moving day, the brilliant writer, Renata Adler,(there is a sublime Adler quote in the epigraph)takes the photographs of George Trow and Harold Brodkey off the wall, a final goodbye. Parts of Better Than Sane are elegiac, but all of it is written in prose that, elegiac or not, brings happiness to a serious reader. We need Better Than Sane in our uncertain world.

Alison Rose's Better than Sane: Tales from a Dangling Girl
changed my life in the same way J.D.Salinger's Catcher in the Rye did when I was a teen-ager. Without Holden Caulfield, I don't know how I would have survived mean friends in highschool, my brothers, my parents, and all the rest. Now, in my thirties, I feel the same way about Alison Rose. Her writing is a brand new voice in the world; truthful, singular, witty. The way she writes about her friendships throughout the book (in both California and New York), and particularly with the writers at The New Yorker,"a tribe of Gods," who helped her to become herself and to become a writer, has given me strength. Alison Rose has taught me not to give up. Better Than Sane is a great story.

I read Better Than Sane: Tales from a Dangling Girl all the way through, in one sitting. I couldn't put it down. The book is original, beautiful, droll (as Rose would say), elegiac and perfect. It is also sexy. Better Than Sane is a piece of literature, something people aren't accustomed to anymore. Anyone who doesn't agree with me doesn't know what literature is. Rose has created an entire set of characters here. Their interactions made me a little bored with my own life. Through the dialogue (there isn't dialogue like this in any book I can think of)and the prose itself, the reader understands how Alison Rose has survived. She was "rescued by her own actions and didn't get killed," as George Trow, her mentor at The New Yorker and writer of "Within the Context of No Context" said to
her. An editor at the magazine, where Rose became a staff writer,
said to her, "You see beyond." She does.

I think, from reading the other customer reviews of this book, that this must be one that you either love, or hate. Put me in the latter category. There was great potential in this book - Alison Rose is clearly a good writer, she has brushed up against many other good writers and interesting people, and led an unconventional life. But. Arrgggh! She tells us only the faintest of details, skips around in time so it is difficult to piece together what happened when, and gives us no context for her actions or her memories. She has had a devastating effect on others - men and women - in her life (judging from what she tells us, anyway). But there's no real indication of WHY she was able to captivate so many interesting, intelligent and prominent people.

This books makes me ashamed that I am a white female. Alison Rose is the most vapid foolish sycophant little rich girl imaginable. There is not one funny or witty remark in this book. I don't know what she means by being insane. Perhaps she does have schizophrenia. That might be a reason for her super dull behavior. She zeros in on men who have some sort of fame: Burt Lancaster's son, a mnor film celebrity, several New Yorker writers and then debases herself and flatters them endlessly until they submit to her company but some how she cannot even tell us why they are interesting to others. She copies down the most banal things they say. I see on the book jacket that now she occasionally writes for Vogue. She is not employed by the New Yorker and was briefly a receptionist there. Her 94 year old mother should have written the book. Alison's father was correct about her from the start. But instead of a psycho, she's a sycophant.

alison rose has been one of the best things going in new york for some time. she has had great and talented friends, such as harold brodkey and george trow, and she learned something from everyone she met, but she has come up with a voice and a story and a way that is completely her own and completely riveting and new. in my opinion, this book will go from friend to friend until it becomes a classic.

I choose this book because I saw that Alison Rose has been a contributor to the "New Yorker" magazine, and thought this might be a stimulating, inspirational book for other aspiring writers. Instead, it is the sad story of someone with apparently many capabilities and talents who has spent her life hanging on to others (mostly men) for her identity. There are no photographs of Rose (except for, presumably, the one on the dust cover) or anyone else who has been in her life, which is frustrating. Instead, she spends quite a bit of time telling us how incredibly attractive (and talented) she is by quoting what others have said about her. It is also rather appalling that a woman who is now 60 years old continues to refer to herself as a "girl".

I love The New Yorker. Each week, it's like a precious gift, and I relish every page, particularly 'Talk of the Town'. So one can imagine my delight at the prospect of a book by Alison Rose. Sadly, I feel that with her book she really drove home the fact that the ability to type does not mean one should write a book.

This is the long, minutely detailed story of an apparently very beautiful woman who finds herself incredibly fascinating. Maybe she is truly fascinating, and just can't convey it through writing. Maybe this is why someone at Knopf deemed it acceptable to publish this excruciating memoir and send it out into the world. Or maybe Alison was just sleeping with the right person at the right time. Again.

In closing, I would like to cite the sentence that pushed me over the edge, that transformed me from irritated non-fan into sarcastic review-writer: "The day before he made the birthday card for Puppy-I'd brought her into the office and introduced her to some writers and editors-I was carrying her under her front legs, her dog ankles were crossed, and Harold said, 'She should be wearing a skirt'." This is the type of statement people make in passing four hundred times a day. I have probably said this very thing to someone ahead of me in line at the post office. It doesn't make for interesting reading, and that's a shame because this book is comprised of similar sentences. God, the boredom.