Customer Reviews

Necessary Madness

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

In Jenn Crowell's Necessary Madness we get introduced to a mother and son enduring a "spot in time"-a husband and fathers recent death. Reading this story is like looking into a kaleidoscope by which your own life experiences shape the picture that you see with your eyes squinted. I valued the book for the questions it raised about death: Is better for someone to die suddenly or is it better to have time for closure? Why do some people surrender their lives to suicide while others grasp on to the beauty of life even as white blood cells over take them? How can a parent be authentic in grieving when it is as Crowell reminds us such a selfish process? These questions surfaced for me during the reading. It is a heartfelt story that reminds us that as long as there is purpose . . .there is life.

A couple months ago I read Jenn Crowell's first book, Necessary Madness. I wept, I shook, and I told anyone in my proximity to read it! I felt in awe to read a first writer's talented work and to have been brought into the realm of her character, Gloria Burgess: her love, her loss, her renewal. The story was wonderfully woven, complete with nearly every emotion a woman in Gloria's position would experience. Miss Crowell's brillant choice of words created a memorable image I am not soon to forget. Anyone who is planning on getting married or who wants to fall in love or who is already there and beyond should read Crowell's take on what love is, or at least what it should be. It's honest emotions, honest desires and honest madness, and above all a beautiful debut for an author I'd love to read again and again.

Overall, I found Jenn Crowell's book about Gloria Burgess, a schoolteacher grieving over the recent loss of her husband well-crafted, engaging, and moving, with only a few irritating slides into melodrama and some unrealistically analytical dialog. However, Crowell more than compensates with her truthful, human renderings of people, events and emotions. This is a great achievement, especially taking into account the young age of the writer when it was first written and published. I highly recommend this one!

Just seventeen when she wrote NECESSARY MADNESS, Jenn Crowell has fashioned a novel wise beyond her years. Her ability to tap into the deep, maddening ache of grief belies her age.

Gloria, while studying abroad in England, falls in love and marries a British painter, Bill, who is gentle and thoughtful and unpretentious. They are happy, gloriously happy: Bill paints and Gloria teaches. They conceive a son and life seems good, too good. Then Bill suffers from a loss of energy and bruises on his arms. Tests reveal cancer. Slowly, he dies. Gloria, bereft and adrift, tries to carry on, but she is unable to contain an unpredictable emotionality.

Since the book opens on the day of the funeral, we learn through flashbacks the history of their relationship as well as the history of Gloria's dysfunctional family -- a cloying father and a resentfully shrill mother, an American and a Brit, like Gloria and Bill.

This is curious territory for the debut novel of a college sophomore, though she handles it admirably, stopping just short of maudlin, mawkish sentiment. Her writing and pace are superb. She has a good sense of how to tell a story but falters in handling characters. Too often they fall short of the complexity and depth we expect (Gloria is the exception). Relationships often seem unsubstantiated, rushed, and one-dimensional. For example, Gloria's deep disaffection for her mother seemed unjustified and puzzled me.

Overall, I found the work engaging and worthwhile; its strengths overshadowed its soft spots.

I liked that book. It was nicely written, such a way that you can believe it takes place in England. I am 15 and I'm sick of those so-called books aimed towards teen audiences and they are no more than an episode of "Saved by the Bell." Finally a teenaged writer comes up with a realistic, simple yet eye catching plot. The was pretty much a 30 yr old widow raising a son but the story was great.

I admit it: I'm floored. Seventeen years old? But yes, the author of this very well-written novel was all of a ripe and vintage seventeen years of age when she wrote it. Nearly impossible to believe. I would give this novel highest marks even had this not been so, but that it is so - well, I'm floored.

I read Crowell's second novel, "Letting the Body Lead," before I read this one. It was good, and one would expect an author's second novel to be better than their first... but this is not the case. While her second novel is strong and her command of literary language impressive, it is the first novel, this one, that really astounds. Age of author aside, this is real talent. The story line begins with a young widow and mother who has just buried her much-loved husband, succumbed to leukemia. Crowell's language draws the reader into the bleeding soul of the young widow, makes the pain achingly real. The inner struggles to heal are more than convincing. Even the descriptions of the deceased husband's artwork, "painting for his life" as the character puts it, bring the paintings to life in the mind's eye of the reader. The child, a young boy, is forced to mature over early, as he is told he is now "man of the house." For a while, he is the stronger of the mother and child grieving their loss, but isn't it often so? The two exchange roles of who is the healer, who is the one most in need of healing, and so both begin their faltering steps to recovery from their grief. Loss of a loved one brings out the man in the boy and the child in the woman, but, gradually, they resume their stations in life of mother and son and are stronger one for the other. Dealing with death, for all three members of the family, is a necessary madness and Crowell expresses it just that way. "He coaxed the words onto my silent tongue," the widow says of her husband.

The least convincing thread weaving through this novel is the relationship between the young widow and her estranged mother. Something's missing. The young woman's anger at her mother is palpable, but the degree of it remains a puzzle. Mom tends to yell and be abrasive and unkind, but so many family dynamics are messy and imperfect, that the grown daughter's fierce hatred of her mother doesn't quite ring true. Her relationship with her father, however, described as something of an "emotional incest," the father worshiping his daughter as a replica of his own lost and youthful love, however strange, is more convincing. Minor flaws.

Upon turning the final page, the overall sense of the book remains that this is not only the vivid description of the death of a young artist and the heartache of those who love him, but that it is in itself - a work of art. At any age.

I stumbled upon the book-on-tape version of this book a few years ago, and found myself having to pull over on the side of the road because I was crying so much. The incredibly young age of the author, in combination with her ability to put these intense feelings into words, makes this an amazing book. I had just lost my mother about a year prior to reading this novel. While losing a mother and losing a husband are not the same, one cannot compare grief. I distinctly remember thinking "oh my god- she's saying what I've been feeling and unable to say".

Overall, an excellent, intense book.

At the beginning I was hook. A little a long the way I was lost because I couldn't tell if we were in present tense (after the death of bill), or past tense (before she and bill married). But I couldn't stop reading. The irony between the mother and daughter was simply too realistic. This is an excellent book that teaches lessons that we shouldn't wait till someone dies to learn.

This book is amazing! The words take you and put you in Gloria's poistion. You feel her grief, you feel her happiness, you feel her passion. If you're looking for a book that will alter your life this is the novel for you. I can't wait for the next novel.

Ms. Crowell's writing reached into my innermost being to touch my deepest emotions. Tinged with an understanding of the deepest sadness, Necessary Madness faces the world of the survivors - those left behind - and struggles with the darkness of aloneness in a manner unparalleled in other similar works. Incredible that such wisdom can come from the mind of a 17-year old! I loved it!