Doctors House [Paperback]

Ann Beattie (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: SIMON & SCHUSTER @ TRADE (1992)
• ASIN: B000SEN40Q
• Average Customer Review: 2.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)

More About the Author

Ann Beattie has been included in four O. Henry Award Collections and in John Updike's Best American Short Stories of the Century. In 2000, she received the PEN/Malamud Award for achievement in the short story form. In 2005, she received the Rea Award for the Short Story. She and her husband, Lincoln Perry, live in Key West, Florida, and Charlottesville, Virginia, where she is Edgar Allan Poe Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Vague and meandering, March 10, 2002

By 

D. P. Birkett (Suffern, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Doctor's House: A Novel (Hardcover)

It's a three generation family story, told from three different points of view by a sister, a mother and a brother. At the beginning the brother is looking up his old high school girl friends, having sex with them, and telling his sister about it. He's still doing the same thing at the end. The mother is alcoholic and the sister is depressed. This is all the fault of the terrible father.
Beattie takes rather to much to heart the disclaimer at the front of the book that it is not intended to have any "resemblance to actual events,locales or persons."
There's a certain vagueness about everything that I found irritating. Much is made of the fact that the father is a doctor (which makes him arrogant and a bad father and a bad husband) but we never understand what his specialty is. The mother's problems are laid to the oppression of women in the fifties, so time frame would be important, but we are never told what date the action is taking place in. The only work any character does that is described in detail is that of Nina, who is a copy editor. The characters (except for the nasty doctor) can spend very little time working because they're always travelling to meet lovers drinking coffee or wine or eating out, or in pychotherapy. We are never told how much anything costs.
None of this would matter in a short story but by the end of 280 pages is gets tedious. Beattie should read Balzac or Sue Grafton.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars not worth my time, September 15, 2005

By 

Melissa Green "mgreen" (Media, PA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Doctor's House: A Novel (Paperback)

By the time I reached part 3 of this novel, I was sincerely hoping that some culminating event would tie together the separate parts of the novel - I was sorely disappointed. As I read the last few pages of the novel, I thought, why did I bother to read this entire novel? While the foundation and storyline were interesting and had potential, I felt that there was no development - the story never progressed into anything. I found it difficult to be empathetic to any of the characters; the only interesting part was the mother's perspective. Do not waste your time on this story.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars I Can't Believe I Read the Whole Thing, August 9, 2004

By 

M. Crowe (Maine) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Doctor's House: A Novel (Hardcover)

I read Beattie's novel because I knew the reputation of her short stories and because I'd tried to read three books by other authors already this summer and found them too dreadful to finish. Unfortunately, I wasn't any more pleased with THE DOCTOR'S HOUSE; I think I kept going because I just didn't want to give up again. The dialogue rings false, the psychological basis of the plot feels familiar and didactic, and while the book seems to encourage us to feel that it's building toward climax or at least epiphany, it doesn't. The cast of minor characters feels random and, well, very minor--most so minor I found myself wondering why many of them had been included, and a large part of the tension seems meant to center around the character of Patty, but in the end I just don't know what I'm supposed to think about her. As for the crazy, abusive, doctor father, I didn't buy him at all, and I felt relieved he was dead, otherwise I'd have had to read his side of the story, too.