Love Invents Us [Paperback]

Amy Bloom (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 27, 1998

National Book Award finalist Amy Bloom has written a tale of growing up that is sharp and funny, rueful and uncompromisingly real.  A chubby girl with smudged pink harlequin glasses and a habit of stealing Heath Bars from the local five-and-dime, Elizabeth Taube is the only child of parents whose indifference to her is the one sure thing in her life.   When her search for love and attention leads her into the arms of her junior-high-school English teacher, things begin to get complicated.  

And even her friend Mrs. Hill, a nearly blind, elderly black woman, can't protect her when real love--exhilarating, passionate, heartbreaking--enters her life in the gorgeous shape of Huddie Lester.  

With her finely honed style and her unflinching sensibility, Bloom shows us how profoundly the forces of love and desire can shape a life.  

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In this first novel, Amy Bloom spins the tale of one Elizabeth Taube, charting her progress from an unloved adolescent to (alas) an unloved, middle-aged mother. To be sure, Elizabeth has had no shortage of suitors. Yet, one by one, they desert her, leaving nothing but their imprints upon her personality--which, if we are to take the title literally, is almost all the personality we have. The author steers clear of sentimentalizing her heroine's plight. And Bloom's eerie ability to convey physical sensation--which also distinguished her story collection Come to Me--is on ample and impressive display. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

The first two thirds of this first novel exhibit many of the excellent qualities seen in Bloom's highly praised short-story collection, Come to Me. Again, Bloom's prose combines lyrical imagery with a comfortable vernacular; her protagonist's vision of the world is distinctive, wry and intense. We meet Elizabeth Taube as a preteen in upper-middle class Great Neck, Long Island. Perceptive enough to know that she is unloved by her mother, a chilly interior decorator, and her father, a remote accountant, she is too innocent to understand the attentions of an elderly furrier, who teaches her about the power of the body to arouse passion. A short while later, she acquires the two lovers who will have the largest impact on her life. One of these, Max Stone, is her junior-high school English teacher and a clear father figure. Max tries and fails to repress the sexual aspect of his love for Elizabeth, and as a result ends up a broken man. While Max is almost entirely unsympathetic, Elizabeth's other lover, a black high school star athlete named Huddie Lester, is often too good to be true. The sure hand for characterization and plotting that Bloom showed in her stories is not always in evidence here; a blind black woman that Liz befriends is a fully realized and memorable character, yet her parents are especially unpleasant and underdeveloped. The book's pacing sometimes lags, and the last third of the novel, with Elizabeth a middle-aged mother, lacks credibility. Yet Bloom's beautifully inflected prose captivates a reader. Her keenly perceptive evocation of a young woman's burgeoning self-awareness and her sensuous descriptions of erotic passion are fashioned with undeniable intelligence and grace. 40,000 first printing; author tour. (Jan.) FYI: The first chapter of this novel is virtually identical to a story in Come to Me titled "Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines."
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; 1st Vintage Contemporaries edition (January 27, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375750223
• ISBN-13: 978-0375750229
• Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 0.6 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #752,425 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

AMY BLOOM is the author of two novels and two collections of short stories, one a nominee for the National Book Award and the other a National Book Critics Circle Award nominee. Her stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and numerous anthologies here and abroad. She has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, Vogue, Slate, and Salon, among many other publications, and has won a National Magazine Award. Her first book of nonfiction, Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops, and Hermaphrodites with Attitude, is an exploration of the varieties of gender. A practicing psychotherapist, she lives in Connecticut and teaches at Yale University. Multiple Audie®; Award winner Barbara Rosenblat has been named a "Voice of the Twentieth Century" by AudioFile magazine. The New York Times writes,"Watch Ms. Rosenblat work...and you get the sense that even an Oscar winner might not be able to pull this off." She created the role of "Mrs. Medlock" in the Tony®; Award-winning Broadway musical The Secret Garden.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating Characters, Elegant Prose, April 3, 2001

By 

Cathy A Belben - See all my reviews

This review is from: Love Invents Us (Paperback)

Amy Bloom's stunning writing made what might have been a depressing story a terrific read. I found her characters not only believable, but sympathetic and fraught with the complicated baggage that makes real people interesting--and at times intolerable, as these characters were.

Elizabeth Taube's quest for love begins with the strange fur salesman Mr. Klein and continues through a series of longer-lasting relationships, none of which completely satisfies her--although all of them do, as the title says, invent her. From Mrs. Hill, who teaches her how love through service, to Mr. Stone, her obsessed English teacher, to her parents' disconnected affection, Elizabeth learns about love in the complex forms in which it presents itself to us, and Amy Bloom shows us how Elizabeth learns in elegant prose.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Nourishment, July 28, 2003

By 

MICHAEL ACUNA (Southern California United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Love Invents Us (Paperback)

While reading "Love Invents Us" and about Elizabeth, I was reminded of several recent movie characters who find themselves in similar situations: Enid in "Ghost Story" and "J" in "My First Mister." Besides all three characters being about the same age, all three also have affairs of a sort with older men, all are rebels, all dress in a style best described as Goth and all three are devastatingly intelligent and colossally misunderstood ("My Mother usually acted as though I had been raised by a responsible, affectionate governess: guilt and love were as foreign to her as butter and sugar."). More importantly all have a deep capacity for love, untapped as it mostly is.
Elizabeth Taube, though she complains of not being, is well loved: by Max, a high school teacher who falls compulsively and helplessly for her: "So beautiful, Max thought. Am I supposed to be ashamed for being such a dirty old man, another Humbert, disgusting in my obsession?" By Mrs. Hill a nearly blind elderly woman whom she helps out several times a week and who "sees" Max's attraction to Elizabeth: "You put one hand on that child who thinks you love her fine mind...and I'll see you turning in Hell, listen to you pray for death." and by Huddie a young African American who once his father finds out about the affair, sends Huddie away: "(Huddie was)...a hundred times handsomer than the other handsome boys, kinder than the other sports stars. Even girls he slept with only once had nothing bad to say about him."
All of the characters in "Love Invents Us" have to deal with missed chances and miss-connections. Max's wife Greta says: "I did think it would be a happy life. That is what people think. That's why they marry and have children. In anticipation of further joy, of multiplying happiness." To which Max replies: "People like me marry and have children because we are apparently not dead, because we are grateful. Because we wish to become like the others. To experience normal despair and disappointment."
Amy Bloom's writing is voluptuous, fat and juicy as befits a novel about the many faces of Love and what we as humans are willing to do to bite off some of it for ourselves. If Love Invents Us, it also feeds us, nourishes us and substantiates our existence.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A beautiful, poetic and memorable book., October 9, 1998

By 

Bela (Cambridge, MA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Love Invents Us (Paperback)

This is a book that throughout the year I have found myself asking others to read. It stayed with me... and you would be doing yourself a favor if you read it.