Customer Reviews

The Pillow Friend

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Neil Gaiman is my favorite author, and I'd never heard of Lisa Tuttle. I bought the book based on Gaiman's glowing recommendation on the front cover.

The first part was everything I hoped for. An interesting story of a little girl and her mysterious doll. I liked young Agnes a lot, but then...

Then the novel moves away from the theme of wishing and consequences as Agnes ages. The entire middle section of the novel, over a hundred pages, became incredibly boring. Soap Opera romance-on, romance-off, make-up-your-mind boring. I'm not an indecisive romance person.

Summation: the beginning of the book was fantasy, the middle romance (realistic romance too, that left me hating the characters for acting so stupid), and the end madness tinged horror.

After finishing the story, forcing the middle, I felt disappointed. No resolution at all. The book did explore the consquences of wanting something, but never bothered with the issue of 'is what I want, what I need?' If Agnes decided what she wanted was what she needed, the story would have been awesome. Instead, Agnes is afraid to examine the mechanisms behind what is happening to her, and the book ends with a feeling of 'this is what happened, the END.' As a reader, you are left to interpret the novel and what it means.

My interpretation was the author wanted to be cryptic, surreal, and fulfilling. She got two out of three. This is the type of book college professors call literature, and people like me think of as interrupted dreams. You never know how they end, and forget them later in the day.

Hmmm, I've finished this book a couple days ago and I'm still not sure whether I liked it or not. It was definately entertaining, and it pulled me in and kept me up to late. But first it started out like a pleasant fantasy story...a mysterious aunt, a maybe magic doll, an imaginary horse. And then there is some kind of freaky teen experience. Then it gets really normal for a while..just a pretty regular relationship between the woman and an ordinary man, who is not so wonderful as her illusions have made him out to be. And then....it gets really darn freaky for a bit..not sure if I want to spoil it for anyone but there is a distinct "ewwwww" factor to one bit. But I kept reading to the end, hoping it would all make sense by the end and...well it never quite did. I'm not sure whether the main character is some sort of magical witchy person, or just plain mentally ill, or what. So it kind of left me quite disappointed at the end. THe finish was a big let down.

Having just read the other reviews here at Amazon, I'm suprised because they don't show the book at all as I saw it. It's very poetic. Very sweet. Very real-feeling. The "horror" element is slight. It's much more a novel about love, and close relationships than it is a fantasy. As such many many of the scenes and emotions described are straight from real life. And Lisa Tuttle has a delightful way of expressing them so poetically yet so clearly that you find yourself saying "Oh my gosh, yes that's exactly how that situation feels! How suprising that not only have other people felt the exact same way as me... and that an author could explain it so much better than I ever could!" The pick-up scenes, conversations between men and women about sex and relationships, relationships between parents and children, and very bright children and their beloved books. These are all written better in this novel than I have read them in years. This is a great novel of real life much more than a "horror" or a "fantasy" and you will not be able to put the book down until you've finished it!

Wow. I felt like I walked inside the skin of a nut - and I was fooled almost till the last minute. Unlike some reviewers, I did NOT find the character particularly likeable - neurotic, self-absorbed, and so forth - but being an inveterate reader of science fiction and/or fantasy, I plowed on through to see where the story would take me. But in fact it ends inside the mind of a madwoman, and if there's a story arc here - it's about how and where madness might take one. I have no idea what this story was supposed to be 'about'. Perhaps that was the point.

In "The Pillow Friend," Lisa Tuttle perfects what Stephen King achieves with great success in his early work; she crafts a disturbing tale of dreams that blurs one woman's reality and transforms all her desires into psychological nightmares that literally take on lives of their own. At one time, King knew how to expertly scare his readers to death. He delved deeply into the gray matter of imagination and unleashed a veritable plethora of everyday happenstances that as docile as they seemed grew a hydra's triple heads when analyzed by the mind's microscope of hesitant speculation. The clown in "It (Signet Books)," conscious and unconscious desires in "Needful Things: The Last Castle Rock Story," teenage angst in "Carrie"--these little in-sync intrusions spring from the subconscious like a bumper crop of intestinal parasites, worming their way into the mind's shadow place and broadening a thistle-infested path best forgotten. "The Pillow Friend" navigates with the same persistence; its main character, Agnes Grey, oscillates from one reality to another with such precision that the reader never quite knows whether or not the realm she describes is grounded in a real existence or sprouts from the uneasy seed planted in Agnes's psyche.

As readers, we are never quite sure. We sympathize with the child Agnes from the start, even though we are perplexed by the actual author motivation in the introduction of a "Pillow Friend"--a doll once owned by Agnes's beloved and unconventional Aunt Marjorie that supposedly salved her pre-adolescent loneliness by sitting on her pillow at night and telling her stories. Forewarned by the old adage to `be careful what you wish for' Agnes hurls forward in her desire to possess the doll, Miles, that Marjorie so delightfully describes and upon receiving it for her birthday precariously careens into a world where her every wish inadvertently becomes the doll's command. But unlike the genie of Aladdin's cave, Miles delivers but reconstitutes Agnes's wants into a complex gumbo of twisted fairytales and strange unfinished symphonies that beg for explanations but just deaden an already confused and alienated persona that limps through each and every perspective telling moment of her life.

Cleverly, Tuttle develops Agnes using the guidelines of a typical modern day girl--Agnes revels in her best friends, idolizes her individualistic aunt, goes crazy for her own particular little pony, waxes militantly feminist during high school and college and eventually wishes for the proverbial knight on the white charger. As she is particularly motivated by her search for romance, Agnes perhaps reflects the author's own feelings regarding this almost tedious desire that women of all ages ruthlessly and sometimes nonsensically pursue at the expense of all else. The perfect ending for the quintessential woman inevitably resolves itself in reference to a man and his achievements, relegating the woman to a smiling adjunct position. To a degree, Tuttle reverses this theme when she designs a mental projection of maleness that fulfills Agnes's needs to the nth degree--so much so that she is overcome with such a sense of completion that she can barely think or do anything else. However, the basic female need for a man to complete her takes the reigns of Agnes's life into a moribund world bereft of any real sense of purpose. Agnes literally wallows in state of consciousness where her needs are met with a ferociousness she can barely sustain and yet when she enters into covenants with the very secondary male characters, her genuinely earnest intentions droop and dry like flowers left without water.

Tuttle has a gift for creating an uncomfortable strain that squashes any glimmer of a happy resuscitation. Agnes's optimistic and puppyish exuberance crumbles with the harsh reality of the consequences of too high expectations. Nevertheless, no matter how ill at ease the reader feels, he/she is compelled to read on and fumble through with fascination some of the most frightening images and experiences that push the entire envelope to the point of breakage. At one point, I found myself shaking my head with both disgust and horror, moving on frantically for that `a-ha' moment that would clear up the entire muddled fabric of the narrative only to arrive at the conclusion that Agnes had indeed gotten what she, in her deluded mind had conceived to be her heart's desire, but that I deemed inconclusive to an otherwise interesting speculative journey into the nature of delusion.

Bottom line? The genre of fantasy should create an illusory universe that entices with the forbidden. Lisa Tuttle, author of the equally disturbing "The Mysteries" succeeds with merit in achieving this goal in "The Pillow Friend." Weaving the real with the shattered spider webs of a too imaginative mind, like an early Stephen King she magnificently crafts a real flesh and blood character who buys into one too many fairy tales and ends up coloring way outside the lines of her own sanity. Recommended even if the ending is slightly flawed and lacks the smack of an actual conclusion.
Diana Faillace Von Behren
"reneofc"

Having read "The Pillow Friend" feverishly from cover to cover, I'm still not sure if Agnes Grey suffers from delusions, or if she's lucky enough to be able to really have her wishes come true "as long as she accepts the consequences."

Agnes is a very likeable character whose life is not fairy-tale perfect. Lisa Tuttle, whose works I've been reading since I was an adolescent, paints vivid, realistic identities when she creates people.

How very ... odd ... that amazon.com advertises buckwheat pillows, those pillows for a good night's rest, on the page describing a book of dreams wrapped in nightmares like egg rolls!

The story folds and unfolds like a piece of fabric, plot flowing smoothly from beginning to end. The patterns are slightly disturbing, and I'm still not sure whether it was madness or magic bringing gifts to Agnes. However, this tale is an incredibly enjoyable read, and it makes me want to continue my quest to find more Lisa Tuttle books.