Most Helpful Customer Reviews
16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Entertains and educates--unputdownable, September 1, 2009
This review is from: Remedies (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
This is an exquisitely written, urbane novel that has teeth to it--cutting incisors that bite and sting and leave their marks right down to the marrow and bone (and into your heart). With sinewy, spiked prose and metaphors that melt in your mouth, Remedies seizes you from the first sentence and moves tautly with each ensuing page. There is not one bland, banal, or stale phrase in this book. It's clean and scrubbed, tangy and citric; moreover, it migrates under your skin. The pages flutter and fly as you descend into depths as sharp and barbed as a large bore needle.
Simon Bear, who is a (internist) doctor, and his wife, Emily, a (PR) spin-doctor, are successful at their careers. However, their marriage is bleeding out--they suffered a tremendous blow sixteen years ago and still have old, gnawing wounds that prevent the healing process from taking root. Their thirteen year-old-daughter, Jamie, has sullenly retreated from their love and their lives and is also maimed by their psychic torment.
Simon's coping strategies include starting projects or hobbies at full speed ahead and then dropping them cold. In the basement are his abandoned projects, along with the fragments of the pain he shares with Emily. His new enterprise is winemaking, which he plans on doing with Jamie and surprising his wife with when he has the wine bottled. He desires to earn back her attention and respect, but he again becomes sidetracked by his patients--he believes he has stumbled upon the cure for chronic pain.
Meanwhile, Emily feels guilty for not having maternal instincts. She loves Jamie but cannot knock down that wall between them. She is convinced that her daughter hates her and that it is too late for them to forge a bond. Instead, they communicate with a dreadful silence or stilted sarcasm.
This story is largely about pain, in all its physical and emotional contours--acute, chronic, dormant, breakthrough, intermittent, repressed, ransacked--individual and universal. Simon's private agony is redirected to his devotion to his patients and his personal crusade to cure their chronic pain. But there is also a burning, subconscious agenda running underneath Simon's goodwill that threatens to subvert his best intentions. In the meantime, Emily has found her own salve, evading her pain by recoiling from her family. Eventually, the woeful tailspin they have created will confront them with the troubled past and threaten to precipitate a fatal future.
Kate Ledger writes with a whip and holds her stride with a balletic rhythm; she alternates from Emily's story to Simon's with the alacrity of a gazelle, delivering a wry, ironic, and epigrammatic narrative ringed with an aching pathos that trembles and intoxicates the reader. The gaps fill in gradually, with impeccable timing, opening up periodic core glimpses into the Bears' bedrock distress. Unputdownable.
Addendum: For anyone who lives with chronic pain or loves anyone who suffers from chronic pain, this is a must-read. This is the first novel that I have read that educates and advocates the compassionate and generous use of opioids for intractable pain--pain that does not respond to any other treatment. At the risk of sermonizing here, I have seen the effects of inconsolable pain on people who have been harmfully denied necessary medication (I am an RN). Even many health care professionals (MD's, RN's, adjunct therapists) do not apprehend this. (And many MD's who do advocate for the patient and prescribe narcotics are getting negatively audited and flagged by the DEA.) Often, patients are shamed with pious moralizing about addiction or accused of "med-seeking" or outright lying. This novel, as well as being highly entertaining, will vividly edify the reader about pain--anything and everything you thought you knew but probably didn't. And, hopefully, this story will have a helping hand in giving people who feel hopeless, who have suffered a reduced quality of life--assistance and dignity and hope.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Marriage, Devastated..., July 28, 2009
This review is from: Remedies (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
In "Remedies," Kate Ledger has written a stark portrait of a devastated marriage. Devastated by the spouses' inability to overcome their pasts, both as individuals and as a couple... Devastated by the spouses' self-absorption... Devastated by the spouses' narcissisms... Devastated by the spouses' self-delusions... This, in a nutshell, sums up "Remedies."
Dr. Simon Bear, a respected physician, is driven by his need for acceptance and affirmation. Conceived at a time when unwed mothers were considered "ruined," Simon has been raised by the stepfather who married his mother while she was pregnant. Having never felt a part of his mother and stepfather's close relationship, Simon continues, without success, to seek their approval. Thus, he is unable to remedy his own emotional pain. Failing to obtain his parents' approval, Simon focuses on satisfying his patients' need for relief from physical pain and basks in their adulation. Simon throws himself into his work, deluding himself into the belief that only he understands and empathizes with them. And so, in providing a remedy for his patients' anguish, Simon attempts to provide an alternate remedy for his own pain.
Focusing on his patients' physical pains, Simon is oblivious to his wife's silent anguish. Emily, successful as a partner in a public relations firm, is torn by her unexpressed pain and by the realization that her marriage is a hollow shell. Her pain - hiding her father's psychological illness and subsequent suicide, failing to mourn the death of their infant son Caleb, being emotionally separated from their daughter Jamie - serves as a catalyst for renewing an affair with a former lover. Only when Jamie almost dies as the result of an infection and only when Emily's lover returns to his wife, does Emily confront her demons and move forward with a new life. She has truly found the remedy for her pain.
I found both Simon Bear and his parents to be unappealing individuals who never allow their focus to move beyond their own worlds. They never become well-rounded individuals or exhibit any personal growth. Even in the final scene, when Simon is leaving the synagogue to seek Emily's forgiveness, he "felt certain he would know what to say..." In my opinion, Simon remains an individual who believes he is always correct and can see no one other than himself. Emily is a more strongly written character who grows through the novel and is able to move beyond her self interest. She becomes someone to respect.
"Remedies" is an intelligent, well written book; but, it is not an entertaining book. Rather, it is an emotionally draining look at a marriage which has been allowed to languish and die.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"People Shouldn't Be Forced To Suffer.", March 3, 2010
Remedies is a book about pain, in all its different manifestations: chronic physical pain, emotional pain, pain that permeates through marriages and lifes and throughout bodies. Ms. Ledger's debut novel focuses squarely on unacknowledged grief and unresolved pain through the microcosm of the family and the macrocosm of the medical world.
Simon Bear is a well-loved internist who is willing to go to great lengths to alleviate his patients' suffering, operating his respected Baltimore practice from a built-on wing of his magnificent and historic home. His wife, Emily, is a partner in a prestigious PR firm who handles corporate crises with aplomb but cannot handle a crisis that's brewing in her own home: the growing rebelliousness of her 13-year-old daughter, Jamie. Neither of them has been able to successfully navigate the death of Caleb, their first-born infant son; nor can Simon truly connect to his out-of-state parents, who believe he is pushing through all their boundaries.
Through a quirk of fate, Simon stumbles across a trial drug that appears to be the panacea for pain. But he has a new assistant -- someone who is dead-set against experimentation and opiates for the chronically pain-laden patients -- who is setting herself up to be his downfall. (In one of the least convincing passages toward the beginning, Simon kisses her, bringing in the potential of a harassment suit). Simon says, "People shouldn't be forced to suffer. I don't believe they should be told to keep a stiff upper lip, or tough it out. Life is hard enough and long-term pain doesn't do any good for the person who's experiencing it. Ask any doctor, any good doctor, any doctor telling the truth, and they'll admit that opioids work best. They're the gold standard for pain relief." While Simon dedicates himself ironically to a "cure for pain", his wife is trying to dull her own pain through an affair with an old boyfriend.
Ms. Ledger -- who worked for several years as the senior writer at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, according to the book blurb -- knows her way around the world of pain. She knows how pain can destroy a life. (I learned this first-hand during one unfortunate year.) And she's willing to push her characters into the fray and take important stands. She also writes impressively about the dissolution of a marriage when two people just want to push themselves forward without examining their grief.
She makes one error that's common to debut novelists: she stage directs instead of trusting the reader to "read" her characters' emotions. Her characters "announce", or "sing out", or "quip" or "chime in" or "belt out" or "demand." She often states rather than suggests what her characters are feeling. I trust that as she moves forward, she will empower the reader more in this regard. Still, she deserves kudos for taking on a weighty subject and executing it with empathy and assurance.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
|
