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44 of 48 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
EXIT HERE!!!!, April 21, 2009
Let me start off by saying that I never met a Douglas Kennedy book that I didn't love!! This book had arrived a few days ago (ordered from the UK because it came out there first) and, each time I passed the table where it was sitting, I actually got a tingle just seeing the name Douglas Kennedy on the cover and knowing that something great was between those covers. I like to think I discovered Douglas Kennedy all on my own many, many years ago when I read The Big Picture. At that time, whenever anyone asked me to recommend a great book, that's the one I told them to read. Kennedy followed up The Big Picture with The Job....another great roller coaster ride of a book. I don't know if something changed in his life at that point because all of the following books were very different. They were specifically about women or couples who were going through major rifts in their lives. As far as I'm concerned, no one can get inside of the head of a woman like Douglas Kennedy can. I wouldn't want to be his wife. Kennedy writes that "All novels are about a crisis and how an individual -- or a set of individuals --negotiates said crises." In Leaving The World, the main character Joan Howard lives in the world of academia having gotten her PhD from Harvard and is now working as a professor at a New England college. I think Kennedy makes her so intellectually superior so that some of the things she does end up making her look more than intellectually challenged. Obviously doomed by her impulses, Jane finds herself mixed up in one predicament after another. It's how she deals with her crises that gives this book the depth that Kennedy's readers know he will deliver. She cannot stick to anything or anyone and finds herself lost in a world of people who continually leave her. Until one day she decides that she will leave them. This is where Kennedy shines as he now puts Jane in charge of her own life and her own destiny and where we see shades of the excitement found in The Big Picture seeping through each page. While some people might say this book starts out slowly, they would be right because this is the way Kennedy sets the stage for things to come. He wants his reader to be totally invested in his character before he asks them to understand her. When we first meet Jane, it is in the present moment but, like everyone else, she has a back story and it's the understanding of this back story that will eventually help the reader to understand why she does what she does. In the book Kennedy says, "Life can only be lived forwards and understood backwards." And so we really come to understand more and more what is propelling Jane. There are times in the book where I was screaming, "NO Jane...don't do it", only to have my words fall on deaf ears. Jane's life is one of ups and downs never seeming to find that happy medium between living and actually being happy doing so. Kennedy says in the book, "Unhappiness isn't simply a state of mind; it is also a habit." Reading this book is a journey as Jane tries to break this habit. It's another examination of the psyche of a woman by a master storyteller. In the hands of Douglas Kennedy, it becomes an expedition and one I was happy to take. I know I've quoted Kennedy a lot in this review but some of the things he says in this book had such meaning to me. I leave you with one of the best...."Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that somebody might be looking." Well, I'm now your conscience looking at you and watching to see if you read this book!!!
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Douglas Kennedy is back in form, May 22, 2009
I would advise you not to bother reading the inside flap of this book, as it doesn't give a very helpful idea of what the story is about and it reveals spoilers that don't eventuate until very late in the piece. Leaving The World is narrated by Jane Howard, an English professor whose life has been characterised by being betrayed or let down by almost every significant person that she has been close to. Finally events drive her to a point where she can take no more and she makes a dramatic decision to "leave the world" by fleeing everything and everyone that she knows. But this in many ways becomes the beginning of her life rather than the end of it as she finally stops being a passive participant in her life. This is a long book and it takes a while to come together. For the first hundred pages or so I was interested enough to keep reading but not so gripped that I couldn't put it down. Jane was not very likeable and I also got tired of the way that every relationship she had was so dramatic, every character so unbelievably larger than life: her mother, her father, her first boyfriend, her second boyfriend, her boss, her husband, his business partner... Having said that, as I read on I felt more and more caught up in Jane's story and I find myself liking her more and more. Douglas Kennedy has always had a talent for creating complex female characters and for communicating the misery of intense depression without getting bogged down in it. The momentum keeps building with some quite unexpected twists. I was riveted by the book's final third which I read without stopping, unable to put the book down. In many ways this book picks up pieces from all the best of Kennedy's novels - there are segments that are reminiscent of The Job, A Special Relationship, The Pursuit of Happiness and The State of the Union. It's a great read, well worth your time.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
life interrupted, May 9, 2010
To his many fans, Douglas Kennedy delivers yet another masterfully woven tale. And yet I was left feeling a bit disappointed, as if this one didn't quite live up to the standard set by earlier books like State of the Union and The Big Picture.His trademark seems to be being able to get inside the heads of his female protagonists in a manner which few female writers, let alone other males, come close to emulating; in this he again delivers in spades.What failed for me in this story is the development in the sequential narrative of what befalls his heroine. I was left feeling that the implausibility outweighed my involvement and investment in the fictional world that Jane Howard Inhabits. As a harvard academic, Jane is a typical bluestocking with a backstory of betrayal and emotional disappointment, not least in her parents, whose fractured relationship she has vowed not to reprise, forswearing marriage and children for herself and finding her only exitential meaning in academia. Kennedy takes time to develop jasne's character and at times she is not an especially sympathetic character - I found myself struggling to like her at first and by book's end, although one is more involved in her story and keen to see the denouement, I hadn't greatly warmed to her as a person. For most of her life Jane has been a passive observer of life but suddenly, her moment of crisis arrives and she deals with it by leaving the world. She abandons everything and everyone she knows and seeks a kind of oblivion in travel and a new life in a distant town. Through a series of increasingly improbable adventures, Jane finally learns to take control of her own life and destiny and to break the cycle of passivity and depression that has hitherto characterized her existence. Whether the final outcome for jane is likely, a wise choice or just great writing, the individual reader will have to decide. I found this a good read, looking back, but there were times when I felt decidedly irritated with Ms. Howard, and even a bit disappointed with Mr.Kennedy. Still, I'm glad I read it and whether you are lukewarm or ecstatic about Douglas Kennedy's books, they are never dull and always repay whatever effort is required. This one is no exception.
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