Breakable You [Paperback]

Brian Morton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2007

Adam Weller is a moderately successful novelist, past his prime, but squiring around a much younger woman and still longing for greater fame and glory. His former wife, Eleanor, is unhappily playing the role of the overweight, discarded woman. Their daughter Maud has just begun a frankly sexual affair that unexpectedly becomes life-changing. Into each of these lives the past intrudes in a way that will test them to their core. With perfect pitch and a rare empathy, Brian Morton is equally adept at portraying the life of the mind and how it plays out in the world, brilliantly tracing the border between honor and violation. Here Morton tells his strongest story yet—a story about love, friendship, literary treachery, and what each of us owes to the past.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

While the story of two broken couples—one by infidelity, one by tragedy—contains a number of maudlin moments, this polished novel's touchy-feely title belies the trenchant humor of its take on contemporary New York, especially its literary scene. Adam Weller—one of the more engaging scoundrels in recent fiction—is an aging, semirenowned novelist whose star is on the wane. Petty, egocentric and devious, he has left his wife, Eleanor, for a beautiful, ambitious younger woman, Thea. Through a series of improbable events, he acquires a late rival's long-lost, unpublished manuscript, a masterpiece which he appropriates and sells as his own, in hopes of reviving his flagging career. Eleanor, an Upper West Side therapist, struggles to recover from their breakup, even as an old college sweetheart tries to reconnect with her. Meanwhile, their daughter, Maud, a philosophy grad student with a history of depression, enters into an unlikely but intense affair with Samir, a man haunted by the death of his young daughter from a previous marriage. The interwoven plots proceed briskly toward what could be a spectacularly melodramatic climax, but despite occasional contrivances, Morton (Starting Out in the Evening) brings the novel to a quietly moving conclusion. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The New Yorker

This packed novel about the vagaries of love and grief takes place in a New York straight out of Woody Allen: enormous apartments abound, and girls in bars say things like "Paul Auster makes me wet." Adam Weller, an aging, still handsome Jewish novelist, has recently left his wife, a psychologist. She, when not (with justification) trying to smash grapefruit into Adam's face, worries about their daughter, a philosophy grad student who is having a sexually obsessive affair with an Arab-American who, in turn, is mourning the death of his young daughter from a rare blood disease. The forced, almost pedantic quality of Morton's social caricature obscures the fact that he can write ferociously moving prose about the tragedy of a child's illness. Inside his broad comedy of manners is a heartfelt novel about the redemptive power of suffering.
Copyright © 2006 Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books; 1 edition (October 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156033178
• ISBN-13: 978-0156033176
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,532,568 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "The day I met you I tore up all my maps.", September 11, 2006

By 

Luan Gaines "luansos" (Dana Point, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Breakable You (Hardcover)

This poignant novel is at heart an unusual love story, albeit peopled with a cast of eccentric characters who are constantly redefining their most intimate relationships within the world they inhabit. The crux of the novel is clearly articulated by the author: "You're forging your own character during every minute of every day, with every decision you make." Profoundly moral without being judgmental, the juxtaposition of three family members, Adam Weller, his ex-wife, Eleanor and their daughter, Maud, set the stage for Maud's life-changing encounter with Samir, a Palestinian she meets through mutual friends. Adam, a semi-successful novelist in his sixties, reclaims his youth through a relationship with a much younger woman, while Eleanor, a psychologist, struggles with the pain of a bitter divorce, trapped in the role of discarded wife.

Meanwhile Maud, a philosophy teacher working on her dissertation, is content with her books and her thoughts, until she meets Samir, a quiet, taciturn Arab-American to whom she is immediately attracted in spite of his apparent lack of interest. Their first date is a failure until Samir does something so unexpected that Maud intuits his true nature and dedicates herself to opening up his heart, releasing the painfully trapped person within. Through her persistence, the once-emotionally fragile Maud reveals a generosity of spirit and inquisitive nature that is extraordinary, constantly surprising the reader with her tenacity and compassion. The enigmatic Samir is a wonder, after all. Meanwhile, Maud's parents are distinguished by their personal responses to the opportunities that arise, Adam drawn toward duplicity, while Eleanor embraces the long-unexplored potential of her forgotten dreams.

This novel is extraordinary on many levels, most heartrending and inspiring the love that blooms between Maud and Samir, with all that relationship implies. But the author unfailingly dissects the other characters with an astonishing and unerring ease, revealing the flawed yearnings and hidden aspiration behind the outward façade of daily life. From the profound observations of humankind to the excruciatingly painful wounds carried in secret, Breakable You is a remarkable exploration of the true meaning of love, loss and the moral compromises that betray the soul. Luan Gaines/2006.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars SUBTLY CRAFTED, REMARKABLY WISE, September 16, 2006

By 

Gail Cooke (TX, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Breakable You (Hardcover)

Author Brian Morton returns to New York, a setting he painted to perfection in A Window Across The River (2003 ). Once again his characters are fully realized, passionate, funny, and flawed, perhaps microcosms of ourselves.

Adam Weller is 63 years old, a novelist, and some may say hectored, others may say encouraged by his younger ambitious mistress, Thea. She's new to the City and the ways of it. Incredibly beautiful she's a former high school beauty queen and Miss Junior Wyoming. Now working as an assistant producer for Charlie Rose, she likes to call Adam by his last name because "she thought it made her sound cynical and worldly like Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not." However, what Adam needs is a bestseller, not reminders that he's a has been.

His former wife, Eleanor, suffers from his rejection, although she was aware of his previous affairs she had not expected him to leave. Adam had left "because of the explosive combination of Thea and viagra." Although she's a psychologist, Eleanor is overweight and resentful, initially spurning the approach of the first man she loved and left for Adam.

Maud, Adam and Eleanor's daughter, is a rather fey spirit who is deeply immersed in her studies of philosophy. She suffers from depression and seems committed to the life of a student until she meets Samir, an Arab American, with whom she begins a torrid affair.

Fate has a way of intervening in Adam's life when the promising manuscript of a late colleague comes into his hands. The man was his mentor and friend yet Adam takes the manuscript as his own.

The intermeshed lives of these people provide the plot lines in this remarkable novel, subtly crafted, unforgettably wise.

- Gail Cooke

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "I prefer to think that I can think my way out of this, whatever my brain chemistry might happen to be.", December 21, 2006

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Breakable You (Hardcover)

A sensitive exploration of who we are and how we love, Breakable You focuses on three members of a family who no longer understand (or in most cases, care) what it means to be a family. All have made independent choices in their pursuit of life and career, and they now have little in common and few avenues of communication. As Morton, a particularly intimate writer, reveals his characters' hopes, fears, strengths, and weaknesses, the reader comes to understand them and, in most cases, empathize with them.

Adam Weller, a sixty-year-old author who has achieved moderate success, has divorced his wife of thirty years to pursue a twenty-something beauty while trying to write a book which he hopes will restart his literary career. The least likable character in the novel, ego-driven Adam is so self-involved that there seems to be little hope for any self-enlightenment. His eventual publication of "the best book of his career" is based on a shocking dishonesty.

His former wife Eleanor, a psychologist, is an "earth mother" who gave up her own goals to help her husband pursue his. Now alone and working as a counselor, she is trying to put her life back together, but she is not sure if she herself needs counseling to deal with her emotional difficulties. Daughter Maud, a Ph.D. candidate who is still trying to finish her dissertation in philosophy, has been hospitalized twice for emotional breakdowns and has only a fragile grasp on everyday reality. Now engaged in a passionate affair with Samir, Maud believes she has found love. Samir, however, has not recovered from the long illness and death of his three-year-old daughter, and he is having difficulty opening himself to new life.

Alternating points of view among his characters, Morton explores the universal subjects of love, life, and death, but his characters--serious thinkers all--are unique, and their interpretations of how one develops a life, what love means, the responsibilities it entails, and how one copes with death and dying are also unique. As the Wellers' pasts impinge on the present, their emotions and desires affect their ability to think. Their problem-solving abilities vary from Adam's ruthless pragmatism to Maud's paralyzing philosophical introspection, and happiness, we discover, is not a function of how thoughtful, or honest, or unselfish one might be. The action moves along smartly, and Morton's imagery allows the reader to form pictures of the physical world as well as the characters' intellectual and emotional lives. n Mary Whipple