Customer Reviews

The List: A Novel

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4 star:		(2)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is definitely one of those books that keeps you up all night. The characters are multidimensional: idiosyncratic, troubled, wanting to be be happy, and also consumed by sex, longing, jealousy and unable to break it off with one another. Sound like anyone you know? That's what's most interesting about this book: the characters are totally strong, very believable, and the situations they put themselves in are downright filmic, sometimes shocking. If you ever had a bad breakup, or you were with someone you just could NOT get out of your head, check this out. It's pretty wild to imagine the lists you could have made with all of your ex-loves...

As an inveterate list maker myself, I came to Tara Ison's novel with built-in interest and skepticism. Fortunately, "The List" transcends my wildest expectations. This is a deceptively simple tale told with layered, psychologically complex characters, humor, and verve. Her original voice is sublime, as she uncannily constructs and deconstructs a dysfunctional love-hate relationship, shrewdly steering what could have been a familiar journey into surprising, uncharted waters. Ms. Ison's razor sharp wit and indelible prose are intricately woven together, and she expertly alternates between points of view, creating a a delicious tapestry that rings true from start to finish -- with a surprising ending that's definitely worth the price of admission. I was a big fan of Ms. Ison's debut novel, "A Child Out of Alcatraz" (which I also wholeheartedly recommend), but "The List" demonstrates this stellar author's evolving talent through a contemporary lens, and anyone who's ever loved and lost and gathered the courage to love again should place this book at the top of his or her reading list. It's a real gem.

The List is a fun, funny, scary, dark, vicious, and ultimately liberating ride. Tara Ison has written a smile-across-your-face, hand-over-your-eyes story of love and bigtime woe. Funny and hurtful, wonderfully crafted, filled with film history, boozy days, sleepless nights, and two human magnets pushing and pulling at each other until either they or the magical force between them is finally broken. It's love gone to hate and back again, a story of a heart surgeon in training and a once-upon-a-time filmmaker who together trace the literal and figurative movements of the heart in their own illuminating and devastating ways. The List bleeds, laughs, ruminates, and can't live without love. A toxic love story that is a joy to read, with two characters who follow you long after the story closes.
Read it, and hold on.

I picked this book up while housesitting for a friend and I'm glad I did. The characters and the story are so compelling... I couldn't stop reading it because I just had to find out whether this couple was actually going to break up or not. I would recommenend this book to anyone. The description of the book makes it seem like it's only for females (chic-lit I guess they call it) but it's really not. Way too complex and insightful for that label. I liked it so much I bought her first book "A Child Out of Alcatraz". Only a few chapters in but loving it as well.

This novel explores ironies of love, that sweaty, sweet buzz-bliss that sometimes turns to torture. In brilliant prose, Tara Ison captures complicated layers of emotion that storm when opposites attract. This book--which chronicles the ways that medical student Isabel is incapable of mending anyone's emotional heart--dissects a relationship with the precision of a surgeon's knife. Note that there are no heroes here. This is a novel of emotional survival, with neither Isabel nor Al surrendering their hold on the relationship. Their dangerous chemistry is perhaps most clearly rendered in risk-taking Item 11 of The List, when prose explodes into screenplay, when Al's mental lens/POV pans and zooms in during Isabel's graduation party. This chapter demonstrates novelist Ison's range, her ability to render emotion into compelling, and consistently surprising scenes. Details of Los Angeles cityscape, the film world, and the subculture of medical school all contribute to the intimacy and success of this book.

Tara Ison's the List is the kind of deeply human love story that all of us have experienced but few have the guts to render on paper in such a darkly humorous, intelligent, and finely detailed way. Here is love at its most powerful and raw: stripped of sentimentality and the cute cards adorned with bears and bunnies and platitudes about love; here is a story about two people who would rather crawl inside one another's skin than live apart. Gripping, compellingly, fantastically written. This is the kind of love story that absorbs, engages, and pulls no cheap punches.

There are some writers you might read for their inventive plots and others who might transport you with their language and observations. Happily for anyone who picks up The List by Tara Ison, this writer does both and more. In this smart novel about a couple who can't seem to manage to break up, Ison tells their story from alternating viewpoints. This gives the reader the delicious chance to grasp how differently Ison's two original characters experience the same charged events. Ison never disappoints, for she so fully inhabits Isabel the young doctor-in-training, and Al the post-famous director, that we believe that a medical viewpoint or a cinematic story-teller is in charge whenever they have their say.

The List hinges on a list of dates the two lovers agree to share before they finally cut the cord - as various as rollerblading and making love on a rooftop under the stars. What begins as a romantic exercise intensifies for Al and Isabel, as well as the reader, as the pages advance and unexpected disasters and detours intervene. Meanwhile, we are treated to Ison's highly entertaining observations about movies, music, ambition and more, via both protagonists. The gorgeous and evocative descriptions of `that soft dollop of bone at either side of the base of her throat,' and ` sebaceous, crusty expansion of his smell'¯which bring Al and Isabel to life in living, breathing color¯are just bonuses along the way.

I came across this book at the library and picked it up because I liked the cover (yes, I am one of THOSE people). What I got was a book that will forever leave an impression on me. Ison's writing is real. This story is a portrait of a relationship any one of us could be in, and most probably have found ourselves in. It takes a good look at the need to destroy another once a connection is lost. I couldn't put this book down once I started, and recommend it to everyone I know.

You can tell by reading the reviews here on Amazon that just as many men as women like Tara Ison's novel THE LIST. Maybe it is the sheer storytelling technique that draws us all in. I saw an example of this at Edinburgh Castle, a funky tavern on Geary Street that attracts the hip young crowd of drinkers and revellers, often from overseas, and upstairs there's a dim room where bands play, novelists and poets read, people pass out. As Ison read a beautifully crafted chapter from THE LIST, the one where Isabel and Al decide to have the sort of cheap, squalid motel sex they hadn't really had when they were together, I saw the kind of sight you only see in the movies: an elderly charwoman, hard at work in the dark corner scrubbing beer and vomit spills out of the tile, eventually transferring her focus to Ison's reading and then, voila, there she was, leaning on her mop, her grizzled face resting on her hands, entranced by good old narrative drive.

Several of us noticed her, years of hard work slaving away for a hard drinking crowd, and now for a minute caught up in THE LIST just like the rest of us. Then she continued with her job, quietly scrubbing the floor until her pail and mop took her out of the room, where Tara Ison warmly accepted fans congratulations and signed copies of her book for us.

I guess I'm straying off point, if my point was that just as many men read Ison's books as women do, but still it was a touching sight and not something you see at many readings. Not many months after this happened, I watched the DEER HUNTER and there's a similar scene where wizened old cleaning ladies at the Polish church or whatever, gasp and clap when the young bride sweeps into the hall in her vast many panelled wedding gown.

Ison's book details the breakup of a love affair between a doctor and a video store clerk (a man who had once made a movie of his own, a cult classic). The two of them just keep breaking up and making up, each time losing a bit more of themselves, and to finalize things, they agree to compile a list (of things they didn't do) and then stick to it, seeking closure in the way of Los Angeles based people. Their plan goes askew in predictable and unpredictable ways, it is like reading a fast paced Maserati. I had only one quibble, that some of Al's and Isabel's interaction is less interesting than their sidekicks play it. Our hero and heroine each have people (Al has two) with nothing better to do than to comment endlessly about how awful the ex is and was. And who seem ultra fascinated in the breakup and list plan. Maybe acid sidekicks feature prominently in the movies, or maybe in LA, but I've never encountered one in real life.

I read this book for a book club. Had I not been a member of the club, I would not have been able to get through this book. The medical and movie detailing is just too much. It was like she was just filling up space with detail b/c she didn't have enough plot content. I was bored. The story is good, even though the characters are annoying in their persistence in their destructive relationship. It's just that the medical and movie jargon completely ruins the plot. Too much filler!