Customer Reviews

It Will Come to Me: A Novel

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

 

 

I find books about professors on university campuses extremely interesting. Perhaps it's because I romanticize the profession, or maybe because I would love nothing better than to be able to be a student for the rest of my life, but I simply love reading books about academia. When I first heard about It Will Come to Me, I immediately knew I wanted to read it.

It Will Come to Me is the debut novel of Emily Fox Gordon, who is a memoirist. Her mastery of her craft really shows in this novel; the characters in It Will Come to Me seem completely real. Except for the narration shifts, I could have honestly believed I was reading someone's memoirs. Gordon has a unique ability to shape and develop characters to their fullest potential.

Ruth is a very interesting character. She is very conflicted and has a lot of scars from the difficulties of her past. At best, she is stuck in the role of a university wife; she hasn't accomplished anything of her own for some time and just feels useless. At the beginning of the book, she is obviously bitter and perhaps even an alcoholic - she certainly drinks a lot. I honestly thought I wouldn't like her, but for some reason she endeared herself to me despite her faults. I loved watching her character grow and develop into a more healthy person.

I also liked the secondary storyline of Ruth and Ben's son. Their love for him and guilt over what he had become was palpable; you could visualize them questioning every action they had made - did we drive away our son? It was incredibly well written and I loved the way it turned out.

It Will Come to Me is a very enjoyable book that I recommend to anyone interested in a character study, or for anyone who enjoys books about professors. It's well written, engaging, and very easy to read. Emily Fox Gordon's foray into fiction was an successful one and I hope we get to hear more from her in the future!

[..]

Emily Fox Gordon's first novel is a sly academic comedy, replete with a hilarious parade of characters anyone who's spent time on a campus will recognize with great satisfaction. It is also the affecting tale of Ruth Blau, a once-accomplished faculty wife who, stranded jaundiced-eyed on the periphery of the college community and devolving into one of its caricatures, desperately seeks and eventually finds relief from her despondency. Readers of this page-turner will admire Ms. Gordon's sharp eye for detail and comic timing, as well as her warm sympathy for all of the delightfully bumbling, posing, maddening characters who populate the Lola Dees Institute. An intelligent read. Highly recommended.

What a fun book! I worked at a small university at one time and this book captures the pettiness, ego centric environment perfectly. I found the ending to be a bit trite but the book was so entertaining, I could easily overlook it.

Emily Fox Gordon is known as the author of two extraordinary memoirs. Readers of her previous work appreciate the crisp precision of her observations, and her sensitive understanding of the different ways in which people suffer. They recognize her wit and her compassion, her exactness and her eloquence.

In her debut novel, Emily Fox Gordon surpasses her earlier work. This is a brilliant novel, remarkable for its insights into the predicament of those who find themselves lost in a world to which they had dimly aspired but which they find that they do not comprehend. Superficially, it is an academic novel, precise and bitingly funny in its exposure of the follies of those who attach themselves to Universities and to Higher Learning. Every page is pregnant with witty apercus and pithy evaluations. Yet the folly of the eccentrics who populate her landscape is not her primary concern. Fox Gordon reveals, as in her earlier memoirs, a profound compassion for the plight of those whose unexpectedly diminished lives she describes. This is, overall, a novel of great compassion, and we leave it, not only with vivid memories of the shortcomings of her central characters, but also with an enormous sympathy for them. Also, perhaps, with hope.

Great academic novels are not common. Great novels are rarer still. This is a book to cherish, partly because its evocation of characters is reminiscent of Dickens' skill in vivid portraits of the eccentric and the grotesque, even more because it has the encompassing sympathy of George Eliot. Readers should be grateful for it -- and for the fact that so distinguished a writer of memoirs has turned her hand to fiction.

This book reminds me of Richard Russo's "Straight Man." The writer is very perceptive of human frailties, pretensions, and prejudices. At every turn, she nails the inner workings of people, and the boring and stilted people of academia. The protagonist, Ruth, a once highly acclaimed author, has been worn down by a troubled son, and the atmosphere of a small college in Texas where her husband is employed. The lonely outsider, she struggles with motivation to write, and drinks too much.
It is very funny, but there is considerable empathy for human suffering, and yet it also considers the callousness or duplicity with which it can be met. There is a redemptive ending which was a little too tidy, but I would heartily recommend it. This is wonderful book of social commentary.

I enjoyed more than 3/4 of "It Will Come to Me" despite (or is it because of?) the fact that its main character is a woman who is drifting late in life and is obviously profoundly unhappy about herself and how things turned out. Her husband is the chair of the philosophy department at the local college, and is as well intentioned as inept at the job. Some of the characters are a bit too dimensional and hard to believe. But what is worse is the ending: everything neatly wraps itself up in a positive way, partly as a result of a hurricane coming through town. This may be in the best tradition of "deus ex machina" of ancient Greek tragedy, but one expects a bit more sophistication from a 21st century writer...

I'm rather surprised by all the enthusiastic reviews for this novel. Gordon certainly writes well and is particularly adept at descriptions of both people and settings. But truly humorous moments are hard to find in what is supposed to be a comedy, and the main characters are boringly passive. I also work at a university and like other reviewers could recognize certain character types, but I felt no connection with the characters. If a novel is mostly a character study, the characters need to engage the reader! As for the ending, I was rolling my eyes at how false & contrived it felt.
For all the above criticisms, I still finished the book, which had enjoyable elements. It isn't bad for a first novel; I can see expecting more interesting novels from Gordon in the future. But great? A classic? This Dickens aficionado doesn't think so!

I may be one of the "Women" that Gordon describes so aptly, but I don't care. I may not be one of them, too, and I still don't care. In any case, this is the most insightful, provocative, skillful, beautiful and satisfying book that I have read in years. I can't remember the last time I have read a book with so much enthusiasm and awe and sense of wonder at the word and the world.

The story was not a masterful series of plot twists and artful maneuvers to keep me turning from page to page. Instead it grew up around me and became its own universe that I could inhabit. It was not overly sorrowful or sexful or comical, although it did have wonderful deftly done humorous touches. But it was a true rarity, in my opinion, in fiction today. It was truthful and human and I believe it increased my capacity to be both.

I am grateful to Emily Fox Gordon as the earth must be when it has been dry so long it cannot even imagine rain. I will return to this book again and again as a reader and as an example of an honest-to-goodness inundation of remarkable writing.

Appreciative readers of Emily Fox Gordon's two memoirs will be dazzled by her first novel, IT WILL COME TO ME. Gordon has successfully made the leap to fiction with her inside story of academia, deftly plotted with great good humor and appealing characters. Ruth Blau, a stalled writer, and her husband Ben, chair of a philosophy department, are the parents of a homeless young adult, and this dilemma electrifies their marriage with conflict. The book is full of surprises, in turns of plot as well as character, especially in Ruth's evolving relationships with campus arrivals Ricia and Charles. It's always a risk to write a novel from two perspectives, here Ruth's juxtaposed with Ben's, but each informs the other and adds to the momentum. Writers especially will love this book. I won't give away a scene I'll never forget, but it has to do with writing, female bonding, and wicked hilarity. The setting for that scene--you'll know what I mean when you get there--is pure genius.
Gordon is one of our pre-eminent stylists, her observations at once deliciously snarky and profound, couched in knock-your-socks-off metaphors. I didn't want the book to end, even as I turned the pages faster. I couldn't imagine how Gordon would resolve the interwoven cliffhangers. But of course she does, in a very satisfying multivalent conclusion.

I was surprised that this book had so many positive reviews. I thought the book was flat, I thought it was supposed to be funny but it was just sad. The ending... hum the jacket illustration ruins it. I cannot even imagine how this is a happy ending?

I was happy that I borrowed it from the library this is definitely a read once and forget it kind of book.