Customer Reviews

Envy: A Novel

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I've read several books by Kathryn Harrison and enjoyed all of them. That's why I was anxious to read this latest one. It's different in many ways although the sharp perceptions that characterize her work are surely there.

The setting is urban modern. The main character is a psychiatrist with problems of his own. Sometimes I thought he analyzed everything too much and his constant angst was off-putting. Other times I felt his inner pain. Mostly though, I just wanted to shake him and tell him to get on with his life.

And yet the story was interesting and I kept reading just to see what would happen. I read this book differently than I read her other books though. I found myself lightly skimming the passages where he went on and on in self analysis.

In the story, he's just gone to a 25th college reunion and discovered a startling secret. And he hasn't seen his twin brother in 15 years. And although he and his wife have a seemingly happy marriage, they just can't get over the loss of their young son who died in a tragic accident three years before. Stuff happens. Stuff that is interesting to read about. But I just couldn't really care about the characters.

Yes, the plot did hold my interest. But I really need more than plot to recommend a book. I need something more, something that Ms. Harrison displayed in "Poison", "The Binding Chair" and "Seal Wife". Therefore, although her fans might think she can do no wrong and love this book, I found it just didn't measure up to the standards she had already set for herself.

Wow. Just...wow. There are so many crazy things that happen in this book, I don't even know where to begin!

The central character in "Envy" is William Moreland, a 47-year-old psychoanalyst who is dealing with a huge number of personal issues. Will's son died in a boating accident three years ago, and ever since then, he and his wife, Carole, have experienced sexual and emotional distance in their marriage. Will also has a twin brother, Mitch, who is a professional swimmer and hasn't been seen or heard from by anyone in the Moreland family for more than 15 years. To add to the drama, Will recently attended his college reunion, where he discovered enough evidence to make him believe that his college girlfriend, Elizabeth, may have given birth to his child many years ago. Topping it all off, Will is troubled by a series of erotic fantasies he's been having that involve his female patients. Obviously, this poor guy has a lot on his plate right now, and unfortunately for him, things just keep getting worse.

Although "Envy" is very interesting, I thought the pace of the novel slowed down a bit after a while, and everything dragged slightly until just after the halfway point, when BAM! Author Kathryn Harrison shifts the plot in a very unexpected direction that leaves readers with their mouths hanging open and scrambling to get to the end of the story. There is so much betrayal and so many twists and turns in this book, it's unbelievable. I don't want to give away the details, but if you're a big fan of shock-and-awe, you will not be disappointed!

It amazes me that Harrison was able to cram so many dramatic subplots into one novel and somehow manage to tie it all together so seamlessly. The story is exciting, and the book is full of many intriguing characters. The mood of the novel is one of a psychological conspiracy of sorts, which adds to the drama and suspense.

There are a few flaws with this novel. As I mentioned before, the plot slows down a bit in the first part of the book, but I think that only adds to the shock value as events unfold down the line. Also, there are so many amazing characters whose motivations are never completely revealed, especially those of Jennifer and Mitch. I think Harrison could write separate books on both of those characters if she wanted to.

I really, really enjoyed this book. It's gritty, sexual, slightly trashy, and a lot of fun to read. Well done!

"Envy" is a hard book to pin down. In a nutshell, we have Will Moreland, a New York therapist who has elected to go to his college reunion. His wife Carole prefers to stay home since she does not know anyone and they are still feeling the emotional tug of the loss of their son, Luke. During the reunion, most people are more concerned with the whereabouts of his twin brother Mitch, a pretty famous long-distance swimmer, whom Will is estranged. After reading about some of his former collegiates, he comes across the bio of former flame Elizabeth and discovers that she has a daughter that could possibly be his. When he asks her, she justifiably balks at him.

He returns home, and seeks out a therapist of his own to discuss his intimacy issues with his wife, as well as his dark sexual fantasies, as they are starting to interfere with his effectiveness at his own practice. He is also having problems with the abandonment of his twin, who he has not seen since his wedding day. Mitch was born with birthmark that made him stand out to ridicule as a child. Will always felt guilt that his own face was not marred. Little does he know that the brother that he protected since childhood made a mockery of his devotion, as he slowly learns the truth behind Mitch's absence.

A new patient arrives in his office with her own intimacy issues. She is a student and seduces older men. When she relishes in telling him about her sex life in detail, it is evident that her next victim is going to be Will. After she makes an inappropriate move on him, he decides to terminate their relationship and refers her elsewhere. Soon, she is knocking down his door, insisting that he see her. When she disrobes, Will's own lack of willpower triggers a sexual escapade which he will forever wish did not happen, particularly when the patient reveals who she is.

Suddenly Will questions is own relationship with his wife, former lovers, his brother, and his parents. This really could have been a moving story, but I did not feel a connection in any way to the storyline - there was no real emotion, depth, or character development. The revelation of the student's identity is no surprise - anyone can se that coming. All told in a matter-of-fact manner, with little emotion, the story never has any clear resolution, nor any closure, making it a bit of a disappointment.

Katherine Harrison has made her specialty the dysfuctional American Family in her fiction ("Thicker Than Water" - 1991 and "The Seal Wife - 2002) and in her memoirs ("The Kiss" - 1997 and "Seeking Rapture" - 2004). Given her own painful past history of incest and eating disorders, Ms Harrison writes poignantly of the suffering and healing within the family.

"Envy" is the tale of a therapist, Will Moreland, and his wife reeling from the death of their son. The sexual complexities between this couple is touching -- for how can one physically love again after the death of a child? Similiar in theme with Judith Guest's "Ordinary People", Ms. Harrsion expands her plots to explore the losses within Will's life with an estranged twin brother, an eccentric father and possibly a long-lost daughter. Will is a "wounded healer" initially unable to heal himself.

With its dark themes of pain, sexuality and death, this novel is not for everyone. The therapy sessions have the touch of truth to them (though they are too brief). But if the reader stays until its redemptive ending, you will be rewarded with a rich and well-written novel.

Harrison has written a crackling soap opera of pain and dysfunction in the marital relationship. The main character in the story, Will, is a psychoanalyst whose life never recovers after the death of his 10-year-old son in a boating accident.

His and his wife's inability to come to terms with such a tragic accident eventually corrodes their relationship, leaving our psychoanalyst vulnerable to making serious professional and personal mistakes. Will has an identical twin brother, Mitch, who complicates an already sad and sordid tale.

This novel explores interesting territory about the psychology of twins. There is, as many reviewers have said, way too much psychobabble--but Harrison isn't trying to show off! She's in deep with her word processor trying to help us grasp the lengths to which someone like Will would go to understand his personality.

The characters find a way to sort things out in a satisfactory way, and Will and his wife find a way to talk through the pain they've kept from each other. It's not perfect, but I would definitely consider reading another of Kathryn Harrison's novels.

Will Moreland heads to his twenty-fifth college reunion with a pretty confident sense of his life. He's a successful psychoanalyst, he has a perfect daughter and a wonderful wife whom he loves deeply. On the surface, he has it all together. Despite all this apparent perfection, though, Will's façade starts to crumble when his Cornell classmates incessantly ask questions about Will's identical twin brother Mitch, a long-distance swimmer who has multi-million dollar endorsement deals and whose face graces the cover of Sports Illustrated. Will and Mitch have been estranged for years, ever since Mitch disappeared after offering the best man's toast at Will's marriage to his wife Carole.

Out of sorts about everyone's interest in Mitch, who's not even at the reunion, Will has a tense and confrontational conversation with Elizabeth, an old college girlfriend. Will reveals that his young son died in a boating accident three years before. He then confronts Elizabeth, whom he believes may have been pregnant with his child when they graduated from college. He demands to receive a strand of the young woman's hair in order to run a paternity test. Elizabeth accuses Will of being ridiculous, of using this hypothetical daughter to reclaim his dead son.

Back in Brooklyn with his family, Will finds himself growing increasingly anxious and distracted. He feels that his sex life with his wife Carole lacks intimacy, and he resents Carole's seeming ability to control her own emotions by practicing yoga. At his therapy sessions, Will begins to fantasize about his female patients and confesses his obsessions to his own psychoanalyst and to his father, who has recently begun a new career and an affair of his own. When a strangely alluring young woman with her own sexual agenda begins seeing Will for therapy, Will finds his marriage, his career, and his own sense of his personal and sexual history falling apart.

Kathryn Harrison's previous works have been filled with the obsessions and betrayals of deeply complex characters, as well as with themes of sexual transgression. Likewise, ENVY is both powerfully erotic and, at times, deeply disturbing, as it deals with betrayal, rape and incest (a theme explored in many of Harrison's works, including her memoir THE KISS). Her writing is by turns lyrical and hilarious, and Harrison writes about sex with a frank rawness that will shock some readers and leave others marveling at the skillfulness with which she writes about taboo topics.

--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl

I am a big fan of Kathryn Harrison. I've voraciously read Exposure and Poison and recommended them to everyone I know. And that's why I'm particularly disappointed in her latest novel.

Who doesn't know about Ms. Harrison's memoir -- The Kiss -- a true-life recollection of her incestuous relationship with her father? The author is a veteran of therapy. And here, therapy-talk takes over. None of it, however, rings particularly true. For example, here's an excerpt of Will, talking to his 70ish father, whom he recently discovered was having an affair:

"Dad? When you're working -- do you ever feel something being revealed to you? That your consciousness is heightened -- augmented, maybe -- by a force outside of your own intellect?"

Who TALKS like this? The book is filled with sentences that sound, not like the characters, but like the author. Here's another, from a patient (Will is a psychoanalyst): "(He's) very old-school, very houndstooth tweedy. He's so central casting that it's actually cute in a kind of avuncular way." What twenty-something do you know who would describe someone in that way?

The characters don't ring true. They never come to life on their own. The psychoanalysis is very "pop" variety -- a real surprise since Ms. Harrison knows the subject so well. I felt irritated as I read along...especially knowing this talented writer is capable of so much more.

Other reviewers have taken pains to outline the "plot" of this baby boomer bodice ripper. Suffice it to say author Kathryn Harrison, scrupulously adhering to some private conviction that "more is better" , offers estrangement between identical twins, loss of a child, incest, paternity confusion, mid-life crisis and spiteful erotomania as it crops up in the life of one understandably confused New York shrink. This reader was aching for the hero, Will, to book himself onto Jerry Springer while feeling immensely shortchanged by lines from Ms Harrison like "It's just...it's...What is it? Will doesn't have a word for what he feels." (Perhaps the character lacks the emotional vocabulary to communicate with the reader: the author, however, should not. In any case, those are lousy, lazy sentences among so many examples.)
In addition to being insufferably, cartoonishly silly, the book is wounded by a dreary internal structure. Bad things happen to Will-the-shrink, Will then regurgitates them at length to HIS shrink, then buttonholes his wife to regurgitate what happened, what he thinks happened, and what he thinks about what his shrink thinks.
As for Ms Harrsion's "famous" sex scenes. They practically lie on their backs, fondling their adverbs and panting for Penthouse approval: "She's unbelievably wet and tight and impossibly, almost unnaturally, slippery."
"Envy", by the way, is Ms Harrison's 11th book and she should, by now, be getting things more right than wrong.

Kathryn Harrison's bewitching "Envy," with its opening scene set at a college reunion, begins as a novel of manners but, after a surprising and upsetting conversation at that reunion, it quickly cascades into a novel of dysfunction.

Will, a psychoanalyst, and his wife, Carole, are having marital difficulties caused by the depth of their grief over the death of their young son in a boating accident. Their sex life becomes problematic, and Will begins having sexual fantasies about his female patients.

By now, maybe you're thnking, "we've seen all this before." Well, no, you haven't. Ms. Harrison flips you a surprise in every chapter, and she plays around with gender roles, too. The men are chatty and emotional; the women stolid or domineering.

And then enters the carniverous sociopath, Jennifer. Pierced, tatooed, with studs in her nose, she's unabashedly predatory. She appears only in two scenes, but they're at the heart of the novel. She's what you'll remember when you've forgotten everything else about this superior effort by a slashingly effective author. But it will probably be quite some time before that happens.

Notes and asides. If you have preteens in your household, do not leave this book lying around in plain sight.

Will Moreland is a successful psychoanalyst, married with two children and much as he thinks he is able to think his way through his grief over the death of his ten-year-old son Luke a couple years earlier, he can't. He thinks he sees clearly, but his vision is clouded. And he is obsessed, obsessed over the tragic drowning, obsessed over sex and obsessed over the fact that he may be the father of a child he's never seen. Add the fact that he is horribly jealous of his famous twin brother and you have a man who has some serious problems, successful psychoanalyst or not.

Will is about to take a trip into a dark place nobody wants to go, deep into the netherworld of his mind, a kind of self brought about hell on earth and his first step is when he goes to his twenty-fifth college reunion and confronts his old girlfriend, demanding to know if he is the father of her child. She tells him to buzz off and, of course, he won't, so it's down, down he goes and on his journey he meets a patient on his shrink's sofa who is so seductive that, well you get the picture. Then there is his philandering father, just another notch on the gun handle of Will's problems.

Will's obsessions and his journey make for delicious reading. The book is sexually explicit, sexually frank and sexually exciting, even if it is a bit rough on the old psyche at times. I know I couldn't put it down, but then I'm no stranger to sexually explicit writing. A prude might have a problem with this five star book, but if she gave it a chance it might open her eyes a bit and she might learn a thing or two worth knowing. This is a darn good book and worth every one of the five stars I'm giving it.