By Blood: A Novel [Hardcover]

Ellen Ullman (Author)

Book Description

Release date: February 28, 2012

The award-winning writer returns with a major, absorbing, atmospheric novel that takes on the most dramatic and profoundly personal subject matter

San Francisco in the 1970s. Free love has given way to radical feminism, psychedelic ecstasy to hard-edged gloom. The Zodiac Killer stalks the streets. A disgraced professor takes an office in a downtown tower to plot his return. But the walls are thin and he’s distracted by voices from next door—his neighbor is a psychologist, and one of her patients dislikes the hum of the white-noise machine. And so he begins to hear about the patient’s troubles with her female lover, her conflicts with her adoptive, avowedly WASP family, and her quest to track down her birth mother. The professor is not just absorbed but enraptured. And the further he is pulled into the patient’s recounting of her dramas—and the most profound questions of her own identity—the more he needs the story to move forward. The patient’s questions about her birth family have led her to a Catholic charity that trafficked freshly baptized orphans out of Germany after World War II. But confronted with this new self— “I have no idea what it means to say ‘I’m a Jew’”—the patient finds her search stalled. Armed with the few details he’s gleaned, the professor takes up the quest and quickly finds the patient’s mother in records from a German displaced-persons camp. But he can’t let on that he’s been eavesdropping, so he mocks up a reply from an adoption agency the patient has contacted and drops it in the mail. Through the wall, he hears how his dear patient is energized by the news, and so is he. He unearths more clues and invests more and more in this secret, fraught, triangular relationship: himself, the patient, and her therapist, who is herself German. His research leads them deep into the history of displaced-persons camps, of postwar Zionism, and—most troubling of all—of the Nazi Lebensborn program.

With ferocious intelligence and an enthralling, magnetic prose, Ellen Ullman weaves a dark and brilliant, intensely personal novel that feels as big and timeless as it is sharp and timely. It is an ambitious work that establishes her as a major writer.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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Amazon Exclusive: Laura Miller Interviews Ellen Ullman

Laura Miller is a journalist, critic, and co-founder of Salon.com. She is the author of The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia.

Laura Miller: Although there's nothing supernatural in By Blood, it has a Gothic flavor: The obsessive, rather morbid first-person narrator, the creepy faded elegance of the old building where he rents an office, and the voices coming out of the wall, speaking of dark, buried secrets. The fact that he keeps referring to his "nervous condition" as black crows is also redolent of Poe. Your first novel, The Bug, could be seen as a kind of monster story, with the monster being a software bug tormenting the characters. Do you think of yourself as writing in a Gothic mode, and if so, what appeals to you about it?

Ellen Ullman: Yes, I am aware of writing in a Gothic mode. Will I ever escape it?

I'm attracted to the Gothic first of all because of the books I love and keep rereading. My shelf is full of 19th-century novels. They're old paperback editions, pages all brown at the edges, smelling vaguely of mold. It seems right to re-read them today in that condition. Last week, it was Villette by Charlotte Bronte and Daniel Deronda by George Eliot.

And Poe: Yes, Poe. I was completely taken with him when I was a kid. "The Pit and The Pendulum." "The Fall of the House of Usher." "The Tell-Tale Heart." And of course, "The Raven," which we had to memorize in high school. Somehow I did not let them kill my enjoyment of it.

Then there are all those crows in the book. Where I live, South of Market in San Francisco, the bird neighborhood suddenly changed. The old west anchorage of the Bay Bridge, right next to my building, was demolished and rebuilt. Before this, there had been mourning doves and tiny wrens. They suddenly disappeared; legions of crows showed up. I assumed it was all the rats and mice the construction had unearthed. The crows unnerved me. I hated, and still hate, their cries and big beaks and slick black bodies. In By Blood, they became the incarnation of the "black drapery" of the narrator's life.

And finally there is the more personal side of it. The people closest to me know me as what you might call "a dark person." The narrator's voice came to me one night while I sat in my small writing office (in a building like the one portrayed in the book). I did not want to stay within the voice. I felt I had a long story ahead of me; he would divert me from it; and what kind of crazy person tells a story in which the narrator can't see anyone? But once I entered that voice (or it entered me), I understood it was the darker side of my nature demanding to speak.

LM: The narrator becomes obsessed with a woman he knows only as "the patient," who tells the therapist in the next office about being adopted and her desire to learn about her birth parents. Her origins lie in the murky world of Europe just after World War II, but By Blood itself takes place in the mid-1970s. The semi-apocalyptic tenor of San Francisco at that time definitely leaks into the story: the Zodiac and Zebra killers, the fall of Saigon, the upheavals in sexual politics that aggravate the patient, who's a lesbian. It seems like an intriguing period to write about. Wasn't that also a time when Americans were starting to really face what had happened in the Holocaust?

EU: I can't speak for the majority of Americans. I am Jewish and was brought up in a semi-observant home, but one in which my parents, especially my father, had a deep sense of Jewish identity. I mean, I went to Hebrew school for five years and got Bat Mitzvah'ed. So we had an unavoidable knowledge of the Holocaust.

I remember there was a book about the Holocaust in the living room bookcase. I was way too young for such a book. And I will never forget one thing I read: how the skin of the dead came off like gloves. The image horrified me for years.

I did see parallels between San Francisco in the 1970s and pre-War Berlin of the Weimar period: two wild cities, two economies in ruins, two countries humiliated at losing wars. I didn't set out to make the connection; it came to me as I went along, as the birth mother's story came into focus.

I think I set the "outer narrative" of By Blood in the mid-1970s because that's when I first arrived in San Francisco. I had the immediate impression of having landed somewhere a bit scary. I lived in the inner Mission when there was nothing cool about it. The police used to cruise the district and eye anyone who looked "suspicious." The cops hadn't found Patty Hearst. The Weather Underground was active. Women in overalls--a feminist uniform, see the "Zodiac" movie where the reporter's wife wears denim overalls--were politicos to the police, pinko New-Lefties who had made the U.S. lose a war. I saw a woman pulled into a police van for questioning. Creepy time. And that doesn't even get to the lesbian separatist community, as we called it, where women were struggling against dual prejudices: as women in general, and as sexual outcasts. It was a world invisible to most people, even to gay men, for whom the 70s were a grand time of liberation.

LM: As the title suggests, By Blood is about genetic (and other kinds of) inheritance--the desire to know it and the desire to escape it. Whichever path the characters take, they are often frustrated. What interests you about the concept of what's passed on by blood??

EU: Like the patient, I am adopted. My sister and I look nothing alike--in summer camp they didn't believe we were sisters. I know children often are not strikingly similar in appearance to their parents, but there's usually an aunt or uncle or grandparent somewhere who supplied this or that trait.

It seems trivial--appearance. But since genetics is inherent in all forms of life, if you don't share a thread of DNA with your parents, you can have this strange inner sense of discontinuity. I don't want to imply that adoptees or orphans have any special claims on existential angst. It's just that our situation enacts the basic human condition of being separate, individual creatures.

My mother hated that I talked about adoption. She was furious when she saw my New York Times Op-Ed about my "mysterious origins." She could not believe I would even think about it, let alone write about it.

One day near the end of her life, she shook her fist at me and spoke to me in the ugliest tone of voice I had ever heard from her. "Oh, I know you're going to talk about being adopted at my funeral. You'll promise me you won't do it. You will promise me!"

LM: The narrator is compulsively voyeuristic--to the point that he's gotten into some serious trouble. At the same time, he's just like a reader, wanting to know all the patient's secrets, rooting for her to decide one thing or another, interested in the details of her sex life. Do you think that reading, or literature, is inherently voyeuristic?

EU: Yes and yes. But not in the creepy sense of voyeurism. It's utterly natural to want to feel your way into someone else's existence, to have experiences beyond your own. And literature lets you do it without getting yourself locked up.

And let's not forget fiction-writing, another inherently voyeuristic activity. You've got only so much of your own life. If you want to tell stories, you've got to steal bits from other people's lives. I am a horrible eavesdropper in restaurants. When someone tells me something peculiarly interesting, I warn them that, if they don't claim the material now, I'm going to find a place for it somewhere.

I think that literature--essays, stories, poems--is the one form where we can meet, imagination to imagination, without hosts of people in between, no directors and actors and set designers and so on. The medium itself is fairly transparent. You don't need equipment or electrical outlets. You can go off alone to read, and, if the work is good, you are then intensely close to other human beings.

Photo by Marion Ettlinger

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Review

“Smart, slippery . . . Ullman arranges her players efficiently. But what astounds is how she binds them to one another . . . It’s a narrative striptease. And Ullman has such fun with it.” —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times Book Review

“A thrilling page-turner of a book . . . Book clubs of America, take note. By Blood is what you should be reading. Ullman is someone we all should be reading.” —Ed Siegel, Newsday

“What is most distinctive about Ullman’s voice . . . is the way it sounds fully formed, mature both intellectually and emotionally.” —Jenny Davidson, Slate

“Like analysis, [By Blood] has urgency—as if, by talking and talking, a solution will be found. Like history, it extends in all directions . . . Like the best novels, it’s irresistible—twisty-turny, insightful, revelatory—funny when it’s tragic, and complicated when it’s funny.” —Minna Proctor, NPR.org

“A literary inquiry into identity and legacy . . . A gripping mystery . . . The storytelling is compelling and propulsive . . . Ullman is also a careful stylist.” —Carolyn Kellogg, The Los Angeles Times

“Rewarding . . . Deepy, lengthy and rewarding therapy is as close as most people get to reading their lives as a novel. Here is a novel that offers itself as a deepy, lengthy and rewarding version of a therapy. The memory of reading it remains quite intense.” —Alan Cheuse, The San Francisco Chronicle

“Marvelously creepy . . . A tricky thing to pull off but Ullman does it beautifully . . . [By Blood] speaks volumes about the way we think about the Jewish past.” —Adam Kirsch, Tablet

“A dark, brooding, and marvelous novel that doesn’t really resemble anything else, though disparate elements of it remind me of so many stories I love. The book combines a disturbing confessional intensity, as in Coetzee’s Disgrace, Lasdun’s Horned Man, and Tartt’s The Secret History, with a paranoid claustrophobia akin to that of The Conversation, Coppola’s surveillance masterpiece. Surprises from strange and terrible historical alleyways bring to mind Schlink’s The Reader and Juan Gabriel Vasquez’s, The Informers. And the philosophical underpinnings recall, in their unobtrusiveness and urgency, the best of Iris Murdoch.” —Maud Newton

“The writing is as sharp as the intellect it reveals, with a tension bordering on the manic.” —Evan Karp, SFArts.org

“A noir gem . . . Creepy-exciting and skillfully ironic at almost every turn . . . We jump into Ullman’s prose so we can be carried downstream, over the falls, into the past, rolled and jostled here, then there . . . [An] amazing novel.” —Merry Gangemi, Lambda Literary

"Ullman first earned praise for her memoir Close to the Machine (2001), about her experiences as a female programmer in the formative years of Silicon Valley, and followed that with an ambitious, Kafkaesque debut novel, The Bug (2003), which also drew from her experiences in computer-human interface. Nine years later, her second novel thematically interweaves fate, identity, obsession and genetics into a propulsive page-turner that shows a profound understanding of character. It’s a multilayered mystery (in the same way that Dostoyevsky was a mystery writer) and an inquiry into the subjective nature of narrative . . . A first-rate literary thriller of compelling psychological and philosophical depth." —Kirkus (starred review)

"An irresistible Hitchcockian page-turner." —Publishers Weekly

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (February 28, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374117551
• ISBN-13: 978-0374117559
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (73 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #214,864 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #98 in Books > Literature & Fiction > United States > Jewish American

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 32 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars "Knowledge is not relief." December 4, 2011

By Evelyn Getchell TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

With a seductive, unbridled imagination, Ellen Ullman has written an unnerving, intriguing novel that explores a most unusual kind of a psychological triangle involving the novel's narrator-a disgraced university professor with an obsessive compulsive disorder on leave from academia in San Francisco; a German-born psychotherapist with personal issues regarding her German parentage and a counter transference problem with one of her patients; and the patient herself, a smart and successful, 30 year old San Francisco economist, also a lesbian, trying to come to terms with the fact that she was an adopted child.

By Blood: A Novel is a page-turning Hitchcockian type of suspense with enthralling prose that for the most part captivates and commands. I must admit that I stalled in the narrative after the first 100 pages or so. For me the pacing was uneven and often overwrought; or the believability of the plotting could not be sustained with the overabundance of contrivances; or the characters would stiffen or become plasticine and their dialogue unctuous. Yet in spite of these fault lines, I still remained a captivated reader. Eventually the fault lines did disappear and were forgiven and forgotten. By section three I was completely absorbed in this heartbreaking and profound story, a story Ellen Ullman has conjured over the very ruins of history.

The setting is San Francisco during the 1970s. The narrating professor takes an office in an old building in downtown San Francisco, a place where he hopes to work without distraction, preparing a series of lectures on classical Greek literature which he hopes will enable him to return to academia. Unfortunately, because of a thin, common door shared with the next office, the professor finds his concentration is disrupted by the voices on the other side of the door. The office belongs to Dr. Schussler and the professor is able to hear every word of the therapeutic session the doctor is conducting with her patient, the economist.

The eavesdropping professor becomes fascinated with the unnamed patient and the novel opens with the following statement...

"I did not cause her any harm. This was a great victory for me. At the end of it, I was a changed man. I am indebted to her; it was she who changed me, although I never learned her name."

The professor's curiosity about his "patient" becomes an obsession and he a compulsive voyeur. It is from here that this haunting story is launched to explode over the concept of identity-of who we are, of where we come from, of what we inherit by birth, and for the unnamed patient- "what it means to say, I`m a Jew."

"Everyone has his own genetic fate written inside him-his own complement of mental predispositions, weaker organs waiting to fail, more or less likely routes upon which he will encounter the face of death. But what good it it to know? Knowledge is not relief..."

By Blood: A Novel is compulsive, intimate and revelatory. It is not a perfect novel but it is a good novel that will keep you turning the pages. Sometimes erotic, sometimes magnetic, sometimes bold, and sometimes poignant, this is an unforgettable story that will possess your imagination, rouse your emotions, and startle you with an exciting ending.

16 of 19 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Story of Abandonment and a Search for Identity December 18, 2011

By D_shrink VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

First let me say I liked the story line a great deal due to its originality and somewhat offbeat nature. However, what I found to be somewhat off-putting was the excessive descriptive verbiage and the fact that it took about the first thirty pages to even ascertain what the story might be about.

The plot took place slowly throughout and it had a very nice unique twist at the end. The story takes place in San Francisco of the mid 1970s but the back story happens in WWII Germany.

A rather deep suspension of disbelief is necessary to accept the story-teller in his roll as a college professor under suspension w/o pay for his "possible" role in sex with a male student. Having taught in college myself, I am somewhat at a loss as to how this man supports himself on the salary of an unemployed college professor, who appeared to have no other job, at least as I understood it and no other family member providing him with financial support. At the same time he seems to rent an office in the same building as a psychoanalyst and then proceeds to act as an aural voyeur with her one patient as the focus of his interest. There are other aspects to his and the patient's life that are simply not explained to any degree of satisfaction. She is a quantitative analyst but also seems unbounded by any regular job hours.

But the big problem as I saw it was the descriptive language used throughout the book. It sounded very pedantic and extremely stilted in a manner that someone of a foreign background might think upper class, or at least well educated Americans might speak but never would, at least not any that I ever met. Let me give a few examples:
1. "A fire truck wailed below then dopplered off." - I mean, "dopplered off"???
2. "My dear patient drove home through the foggy lanes, again going around and around her lost circuit." - Her lost circuit???
3. "I have said, any man in my position would have responded similarly - when the tumescence proceeded briskly, I became quite alarmed." - Yeah, I'd be alarmed too if I heard some guy refer to his tumescence!
4. "...she seemed to have unlearned the worst aspects of her native speech, for she softened the jaw-breaking growl that passed for an R in that part of the world, and had widened the mashed dipthonged A (a horrid sound, as if you pinched your nose while saying ae-yeah) into an airy open monosyllabic ah." Does anyone get what she just said, and I did study German although am certainly not fluent in it.

Although I liked the shortness of all the chapters, many being only a page long, I hated the long confusing sentences, as given in example 4 above and the use of words commonly found in one form turned into another. i.e. DOPPLERED and the normal use of the word dipthong as a noun turned into DIPTHONGED. The sentence structure sounds all wrong and convoluted, taking away from the story line which I want to say again was interesting, inspiring, and proceeded with a fairly steady if slow cadence throughout.

IMHO the story line deserves 4 stars, but the grammar gets 2 stars which is why I could only award it three stars.

If you can get over the suspension of disbelief about the protagonist, who commonly referred to the object of his voyeurism as "My dear patient" to the point of nausea, and the grammar issues then the story is quite enjoyable and intriguing. This is a book for serious readers and not one to take on a winter cruise or to read on a sunny beach!

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb literary novel April 13, 2012

By barry TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

This novel is definitely a rare and welcome addition to the literary world. Today most novels are pop fiction and generically just fill a genre. With BY BLOOD we get a novel by author Ellen Ullman who has a true gift with the written word and a definite purpose in her writing. She writes with lyrical prose that bring a true beauty and intensity to the English language. She sets her novel in San Francisco during the 70s. It was a time of free love but the city and country were actually going thru a very difficult period. Ullman sets up a very original basic premise and introduces characters who are superbly developed and all serving a true purpose in this novel. BY BLOOD is a joy to read and pulls the reader in. You must be prepared to think. This novel is written with intelligence and a true raw intention by the author. Ullman takes the reader on a journey with twists and turns never ending. It is emotional, disturbing and heart wrenching. It is so refreshing to have characters who are real and possess true depth and character. This novel crosses over many different themes and you will not be the same when done reading it. The journey of all the characters come together for a true purpose that Ellen Ullman masterfully guides the reader thru.

Ullman is a writer of exsquisite talent. She writes with an intensity, passion and realism not often found today. I loved this novel and it left me with much food for thought as any well written novel should. I can't wait to see what she comes up with next in her next book. Highly recommended.