The Life Room [Hardcover]

Jill Bialosky (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 6, 2007

Eleanor Cahn is a professor of literature, the wife of a preeminent cardiac surgeon, and a devoted mother. But on a trip to Paris to present a paper on Anna Karenina, Eleanor re-connects with Stephen—a childhood friend with whom she has had a complicated relationship—that forces her to realize that she has suppressed her passionate self for years. As the novel unfolds, we learn of her hidden erotic past: with alluring, elusive Stephen; with ethereal William, her high school boyfriend; with married, egotistical Adam, the painter who initiated her into the intimacies of the "life room," where the artist’s model sometimes becomes muse; and with loyal, steady Michael, her husband. On her return to New York, Eleanor and Stephen’s charged attraction takes on a life of its own and threatens to destroy everything she has.

Jill Bialosky has created a fresh, piercingly real heroine who struggles with the spiritual questions and dilemmas of our time and, like Tolstoy’s immortal Anna Karenina, must choose between desire and responsibility.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Bialosky falters in her maudlin second novel (after House Under Snow). An academic conference in Paris provides literature professor and New Yorker Eleanor Cahn the opportunity to escape from her humdrum husband and to stir up some long dormant passions. Along the way, the men of her past flood her memory: William Woods, Eleanor's confused and abused teenage boyfriend; Adam Weiss, a womanizing, married painter Eleanor posed for; and Stephen Mason, a childhood friend with whom she never quite connected. After the conference and back in New York, Eleanor agonizes over the life choices she's made and tries to find some balance between her longings and her responsibilities to her husband and children. Stephen re-enters her life, and the two conduct a tedious (and surprisingly nonphysical) affair. Through journal excerpts, e-mails and pictures, Bialosky tells a muddled tale burdened with hollow caricatures and overwrought dialogue. While Bialosky can produce intriguing turns of phrase (she has also published two poetry collections and is an editor at Norton), the novel remains largely unsatisfying. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

In her second novel, poet and fiction writer Bialosky portrays a married couple who embody contrasting scientific and artistic sensibilities. Michael is a straightforward cardiologist. Eleanor is an emotional literature professor excited and guilt-ridden as she leaves her two young sons and increasingly distant husband to go to Paris to present a paper about Anna Karenina. She exalts in her adventure, yet is assailed by unsettling memories of her doomed first love, her grad-school affair with a married painter, and enigmatic Stephen, the former boy-next-door who just happens to also be in Paris. With Anna Karenina as a template, adultery is the inevitable theme, but Bialosky's real subject is the vulnerability of the mind to fear and delusion. Treadmill passages and grating improbabilities detract, as does Eleanor's puzzling unawareness of just how seriously disturbed the men she agonizes over are. Yet Bialosky's brightly burning novel of desire and aberration, and a woman's quest for deeper understanding, is remarkable for its insights into erotic compulsion and the unbearable awkwardness and pain of flawed and failed love. Seaman, Donna

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (August 6, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151010471
• ISBN-13: 978-0151010479
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,480,377 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Mind Numbingly Boring, December 21, 2008

By 

Cheryl Renee Long "Renee the Painter" (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Life Room (Paperback)

Even though Bialosky is a good writer, she has nothing to say ( at least that I want to hear,) in this book. Endless chatter, nothing happens. If her target audience is educated, sexually frustrated women over 35, with husband, children and career, then this book will do a lot to increase the frustration. Exhausting, mind numbingly boring, impossible to read. I am very glad this was a library book.

Cheryl Renee Long

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars (3.5) "Were we all, we who lived deeply, doomed?", August 8, 2007

By 

Luan Gaines "luansos" (Dana Point, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Life Room (Hardcover)

With Tolstoy's tortured Anna Karenina as subtext, literature professor Eleanor Cahn leaves her beloved family in New York for a ten day conference in Paris where she has been asked to give a paper. Conflicted about the trip, Eleanor grants herself permission to indulge in the professional aspect of her life, forever at war with the more traditional wife/mother role, creating a stable family unit that was missing in her own childhood. While sorting through the pros and cons of a decision to embrace her identity as a serious scholar (mostly pro), Eleanor reflects upon the early years of a childhood defined by the adoration of a flawed father who cannot escape his history, the annihilation of his Jewish family. Rather than drag wife and daughter into the complicated morass of his mind, Eleanor's father chooses to leave a devastated, still-devoted wife and loving daughter to pursue oblivion in drink and younger women.

Their home a veritable shrine to what might have been, Eleanor's mother endures migraines while a growing daughter seeks respite in the arms of lovers, from her first crush to an arrogant artist, settling finally for the security of heart surgeon Michael. That Eleanor has one blue eye and one green further illustrates the dichotomy of her existence, the internal war of appearance vs. reality, her husband unaware (and perhaps incurious) of the deep emotions that have so far failed to surface in the marriage. But Paris releases both memory and a yearning to delve once more into the explosive passions that surge beneath Eleanor's academic façade.

In Paris, Eleanor and her colleagues become individuals separate from their identities, temporarily unmoored from family ties and obligations, most evident in the journal Eleanor keeps while in that evocative city. Her bifurcated life revealed through the diary, Eleanor probes carefully hidden secrets, the power of memory exacerbated by a meeting with her first crush, Stephen Mason, the elusive former neighbor who slipped out of her life before Eleanor could determine the extent of her feelings. Stephen is the link, an early unfulfilled sexual awakening, the first male to fill the vacuum left by an errant father. Although Stephen clearly has a private agenda, he is a serious threat to Eleanor's hard-won security. The author thoroughly explores Eleanor's romances with flawed men who are either unavailable or unable to commit, loading the dice in favor of the sanctioned Michael. Without subtlety, Freud runs screaming from the room.

Bialosky's prose is riddled with angst. Are the demands of family more important than one's personal quest for fulfillment? Is the interior life a valid pursuit? Is the past more seductive than the present? Undoubtedly. Familiar questions, but in this case artfully imbued with the parallel of Karenina's great tragedy. Made more personal in the particulars of Eleanor's conflict, this modern woman, as both Madonna and lover, mother and wanton, is caught in a frantic dance on the head of a pin until she literally falls, exhausted into expectations. Luan Gaines/2007.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars enchanting, August 9, 2007

By 

J. Acker - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Life Room (Hardcover)

The Life Room is a captivating read. The text is thoughtfully and beautifully written, bringing the novel's main character to life in the readers mind where she will stay long after the book is closed.