Customer Reviews

The Unprofessionals: A Novel

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

 

 

I have to admit, this book grabs you. You're thrown into this 49 year olds battles with herself and those around her. The plot development was slow, but only being 14 myself, it was a satisfying read. Her struggles are expressed through a series of events throughout her relationship with this "boy" which tests her sanity as she matures into middle age.

The Unprofessionals is a perfect second act to Hecht's collection of short stories, "Do the Windows Open?" She paints her characters with a very fine brush and her language is equally immaculate: there is never a word out of place or a vulgar shortcut when it comes to portraying emotion. Hecht is a consummate professional when it comes to writing. Anyone who winces when they read something badly written should treat themselves to both books.

I look forward to re-reading this novel and reading what ever will come next.

This is a hilarious, harrowing, immensely moving novel from an essential writer. I highly recommend it.

The Unprofessionals is a wisp of a novel; more like a connected series of short stories than a unified, coherent narrative. Its author, Julie Hecht, is a keen observer of turn of the century suburbia in its most shallow and deadening incarnation. She also well understands the difficulties individuals who possess even a modicum of sensitivity may experience as they attempt to negotiate a postmodern landscape characterized by flat emotionality and a general sense of meaninglessness in human relations. The protagonist of this tale of woe, a woman approaching fifty years of age, describes herself as fundamentally lost. She spends her time in shopping malls and discount stores where she wanders aimlessly and nourishes a profound feeling of social alienation. Although she is a published photographer, this aspect of her identity seems mostly irrelevant in comparison to her overwhelming sense of ennui and purposelessness. She does have one compatriot, however. A boy at the end of adolescence who is addicted both to heroin and a discomfiting conviction that there is no point to life other than existence for its own sake. Significantly, although these two 'friends' communicate extensively throughout the book, it is never in person. The title of this cleverly written set of vignettes refers to specialists (especially psychotherapists who are for some obscure reason always psychiatrists and never psychologists or social workers) who fail to live up to their responsibilities and the expectations of their clients or set a proper standard for the critically important function they serve in society. But one doubts there exists a form of assistance which could touch the desuetude and cynicism this disheartening duo seem tenaciously committed to. Which was my problem with the book. Although I am myself sympathetic to a nihilistic point of view, The Unprofessionals left little room for the possibility that either redemption or transformation might play a restorative role in the dysphoric lives of its characters. And without the possibility that these processes might at least be hovering in the vicinity of a downward spiral of fate, I for one lose interest in the outcome.

I have enjoyed many of Julie Hecht's stories in the New Yorker, but I don't feel that her style can sustain a reader's interest for 227 pages. I read the whole thing, but was puzzled by it. The first 20 or so pages never mention "the boy," then all of a sudden, his life is the whole focus.

I suppose the main character is revealed by her reactions to events in the boy's life, but not much. She is the same character who appears in the stories and much of this is a continuation of the stories which in themselves were somewhat chronological in the character's life. If a reader comes to this without having read any of the stories, he or she is bound to be lost.

I found the boy totally unsympathetic and not a believable character. I was much more interested in the main character's observations on modern life and her trips to various stores. I would have liked to learn more about her relationship with her husband. It's amazing that she has one. Who could live with her?

Anyhow, if she writes another book, I won't be reading it. Enough is enough.

Dear good people at Amazon,

You've pdf'ed the wrong book inside the "Look Inside" link to Ms.Hecht's novel. Much as I like Sherlock Holmes, I think you owe it to the author to put in the correct text for readers to sample. Wake up!

I thought this book built on the Do the WIndows Open Stories very well. The Dr. Loquesto stories were not my favorites - I really only got this book because I wanted SOMETHING new of Hecht's. But I thought the book went far beyond the stories. The tragedy of the boy's story, her outsider status and her own fanciful version of who the boy was, and all the things she couldn't know about the boy because she only knew what he told her made this book more profound and less intentionally frivolous than the stories.
It's ineresting ot read a novel written by someone I know for her stories. The book had the same breezy feel, but it IS a novel with a longer story line that is very well-sustained and with much more detail.

I really enjoyed the quality of the writing, but the more I read the more aggravated by "the boy" and the narrator I became. My sympathy for their respective psychological plights dissipated as their snobbism, materialism, and self absorbtion took over what I was reading. Taking vegetables out of a lower refrigerator drawer makes her feel like a scullery maid? She calls herself a child of the 60's not into money, yet judges her shrink by her non designer clothes. Others have praised the humor of this novel. I guess I missed it.

Wow, what a rambling, useless piece of trash. I cannot believe all the praise here - did they read it? I could not get passed page 35 so take this review with a grain of salt. Evidently the heavens opened up after then, based on the grand reviews.

My main problem with the book? She is constantly citing and referencing other books and movies throughout the text (almost called it a novel), as if we've all read/seen them, or even care to. Well done, Julie: describe your feelings by referencing something that most of the time will have no meaning to the reader, rather than actually WRITING PROSE! I can just see her all giddy while writing references to specific WC Fields movies and 'Under Milk Wood' - 'Oh, that REALLY captured it - I am sooooo good at Writing!'

So, I didn't really like it. The Unprofessionals is what I'd call the morons who published it.

Having grown up on Long Island and Nantucket, I was excited to see a first novel set in such familiar surroundings. I am interested in the topic of drugs, both legal and illegal, and my expectations were very high as the novel began.

After twenty pages I started to wonder where this novel was going, and then I found myself speed-reading to see if there was any developing story, and then I lost interest altogether. I almost never completely lose interest in a novel, especially one that is so promising to begin with, but this novel was dreadful. The protagonist is overbearingly anal and whiny and the story goes absolutely nowhere...it is though we are reading a diary, and a diary of a life that is simply rather boring and full of anxiety about anxiety. Five yawns to this one.....