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Reading Alcoholisms: Theorizing Character and Narrative in Selected Novels of Thomas Hardy, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf

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What Shays did for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in *Achilles in Vietnam,* Dr. Jane Lilienfeld does for alcoholism in her new book, *Reading Alcoholisms.* Lilienfeld's book reviews some familiar works of English literature dating from the 19th and early 20th centuries through the lens of what we have come to know about alcoholism, both the "disease process" itself and its somewhat predictable effects upon alcoholics, their families, and others close to them. At the time the works Lilienfeld focuses upon were written, there was no body of alcoholism theory; nevertheless, the authors of these works reproduced in painful detail what would later become familiar trajectories of personal and familial decline. One of the points Lilienfeld scores is to show that alcoholism as we understand it existed BEFORE we understood it. However crude and ineffective present treatments for them might be, alcoholism (and, by extension, other addictions) are hardly the iatrogenic diseases some occasionally claim. Lilienfeld allows her readers to think inductively about evidence in the texts. One might sometimes wish for her to validate our thinking by drawing more conclusions for us. But that's a small gripe. This is a fine book.