Like Normal People [Hardcover]

Karen Bender (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 14, 2000

Karen Bender's powerfully affecting first novel has garnered remarkable early attention. Portions of the novel have been published in THE NEW YORKER, GRANTA, and STORY magazine. An excerpt chosen for THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES by Annie Proulx was recorded by Joanne Woodward and aired on NPR's SELECTED SHORTS.
A tour de force of literary craft and emotional resonance, LIKE NORMAL PEOPLE charts a family constellation that revolves around an off-kilter center: Lena, who is forty-eight but mentally locked in childhood. Moving deftly between present and past, the novel follows Lena's day-long escape from her residential home with her troubled twelve-year-old niece. While this odd couple takes refuge on a honky-tonk southern California beach, Lena’s widowed mother, Ella, goes in search of them. In the process, Ella relives her own life's dreams and disappointments: her marriage to a sweet, loving shoe salesman; her discovery of Lena's handicap and her aching attempts to give her daughter a "normal" childhood. For so long, Lena has been the focus of Ella's world. When Lena at last finds approximate normalcy -- by marrying a man much like herself -- Ella must contend with letting her daughter go.
Covering three entire lifetimes in the course of one day, LIKE NORMAL PEOPLE is tender, often hilarious, and deeply moving. Bender brilliantly enters into the consciousness of three women at very different stages of life, each on a private search for love and acceptance. LIKE NORMAL PEOPLE is a novel about desire, about what constitutes normality, and, most poignantly, about the ways in which a family finds its strength in the face of adversity.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Like Normal People is the story of Ella Rose and her family, a blue-collar clan living in Los Angeles. Ella is old and her mind is going. Ella's youngest daughter, Vivien, is exhausted and harried, full of concerns about her own family. Her oldest girl, Lena, is developmentally disabled and lives in a residential home called Panorama City. As the novel begins, Lena sets her room on fire and almost gets kicked out. When Ella drives over to try to resolve the situation, she takes her granddaughter with her, and while her back is turned Lena and the child take off. For a brief afternoon they are fugitives, riding the Los Angeles bus system, shoplifting--they call it "borrowing"--from drugstores, fantasizing about the house they want to live in on the edge of the sea.

In her first novel, Karen E. Bender skillfully renders mood with a few salient details. Here Ella and her husband Lou are depicted in flashback, moving to Los Angeles as newlyweds: "They began armed with a crooked, raw arrogance. Unpracticed, Ella copied Lou. It made them sleepless, talkative. She, too, threw trash out the car window, and the rhythm of her speech began to match his." Yet her writing can also fall into short, laboring metaphors that never quite gel: "Ella was waiting to understand the emotion within her, for her heart was restless, trying hard to beat with a feeling that she did not yet understand." Like unskilled actors who disrupt a film, such rough sentences pull us away from the lives Bender has created. --Emily White

From Publishers Weekly

Some first novelists arrive on the literary scene already so proficient it's hard to believe that we are reading their debut effort. This is true of Bender, whose remarkable narrative of three generations of women has the wisdom of mature insight and the grace of empathy and understanding. Bender sets the scene, establishes salient relationships and indicates the personalities of her protagonists in the first few pages, in a marvel of economy and poetic prose. In the space of one day in 1978, with layers of flashbacks, California widow Ella Rose will persist in her four-decades-long attempt to micromanage the life of her retarded 45-year-old daughter, Lena; Ella's granddaughter, 12-year-old Shelley, will succumb to Lena's capricious personality and elude the protective custody of family and caretakers for a flight into the unknown; and Vivien, Ella's second daughter, will assume a new level of responsibility. From the moment she understood that her firstborn daughter was not "normal," Ella has made Lena the center of her life, devoting herself to protecting Lena from the disasters that might befall a headstrong but childlike and vulnerable young woman. Despite her mother's misgivings, Lena at 34 marries 42-year-old Bob, a driver for Good Will whose mental development is comparable to hers, as are his sexual needs. For Ella, the marriage is a new responsibility, and she continues to monitor the couple's daily lives. Meanwhile, preadolescent Shelley, na?ve for her age, is shunned by her more sophisticated friends, and in her fear that she is not a "normal person," begins to develop a phobic habit. Shelley, Lena and Bob, all equally limited in their understanding of the world but eager for experience, encounter tragedy, which Lena cannot comprehend and Shelley cannot move beyond. Bender captivates readers with a freshness of observation and arresting imagery. A surreal scene of an "anniversary party" under a beach pier is a model of poignant irony. Bender's subtle humor, her understanding of a parent's need to offer protective love and her tolerant view of human nature infuse the story with universality. In the end, this heartwarming novel dealing with societal misfits, family relationships and loss is about all flawed human beings, "normal" and not. Agent, Eric Simonoff. First serial to the New Yorker; rights sold in the U.K. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; First Edition edition (April 14, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0395945151
• ISBN-13: 978-0395945155
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,675,401 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Like Normal People, March 27, 2000

By 

Jennifer A. Litt (NYC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Like Normal People (Hardcover)

This shapely, loving, glowing novel moved me so much; all the way through I kept thinking, "Well, THIS scene must be the climax, it's so heart-wrenching (or it's such an epiphany, or the writing is so darned beautiful)" -- but what a payoff in the final pages! The characters are funny and vain and hopeful and tender and utterly believable, especially the 45-year-old retarded Lena and her control-freaky mother, Ella -- but 12-year-old Shelley is also rendered with great sensitivity. This novel has everything: unflagging plot, memorable characters, layers of meaning and complexity, and beautiful, sometimes quirky, always unexpected writing.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars And even an ending..., June 28, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Like Normal People (Paperback)

This is a terrific book. Bender chooses to focus her story on those family members whose lives, in some fashion, revolve around Lena, rather than on Lena herself. This works brilliantly: most readers, after all, are going to identify themselves as "normal people." It's very easy to visualize ourselves living a life like Ella's, Lou's, Shelley's, Vivien's, with a loved one who presents challenges such as those presented by Lena. Yet Lena too seems "normal" in many ways: she is curious, lively, loving, jealous. The book catches us in its narrative movement and reading on becomes irresistible, but unlike lightweight plot-driven fiction, this one is also well written. Some critics can find an infelicitous phrase here and there, but most readers are more likely to be struck by the freshness of the prose. And the book ends in an utterly satisfying way too! Not with a major climax, but with a reasonable--and fitting--finale. Book groups ought to read this novel; I hope mine will.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I still remember them so clearly..., September 2, 2000

By 

M. Bandy (Champaign, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Like Normal People (Hardcover)

I'm not going to tell you about plot, because you can read that above. I just want to tell you my personal experience with this book...

I read Like Normal People several months ago, in the hallway of my high school during lunch hour over several days. This information is important because it means that I probably did not give the book my full attention. My reading of it was broken up, interrupted by people coming to look at my math homework, talk to me about the history lecture, or tell me about their latest crush.

And yet...most books I read in this fashion are enjoyed at the time but soon slip away until I can barely remember them. (Yes, I read Dead Souls. There was a guy in it...and he did something, I think.) But Like Normal People was different. Even now I could tell you every detail of the plot. I could tell you about each character, recalling their names and personality quirks. And that's no small accomplishment.

This is Karen Bender's first novel, meaning that I was prepared to be forgiving of it. I didn't have to be. This novel was better than many author's second or even tenth novels. It passed the test of lunch hour reading...simply unforgettable.