Alice in Bed

3.3/5 ( ratings)

The good-looking, deceptively buoyant girl in bed is Alice Brody, until now a sophomore at Sarah Lawrence and currently immobilized in a hospital room in New York. Her legs won’t move . She’s in traction that looks to her like a late-night TV gadget . Dr. Witherspoons can’t find cause or cure…

In this wryly comic and exhilarating first novel, Cathleen Schine gives us a young, sassy, appealing girl suddenly struck down and fighting back; the year she spends recovering; and the odd, crowded life that buzzes around her: her parents divorcing … her mother, well-meaning and well-appointed , suddenly by herself, representing Family, sitting with Alice, every day, all day , comforting and irritating her daughter… the specialists flown in for consultation , patronizing and prodding her… her nurses fussing and her two doctor-lovers hovering around her—Dr. Davis and Dr. Fresser, genuine Israeli hypnotist extraordinaire, authority on pain, barging into her room, his presence “filling the place like a pinball machine,” but able to induce in his patient moments of true calm…

Alice—on the surface involved, touched, even amused—participating in the life of her family, her fellow patients, her nurses, her doctor-lovers, yet all the while instinctively focusing every ounce of her real strength on the recovery of her freedom, the recapturing of what she once took for granted: motion.

Here is a novel that expresses within its exuberant humors a sense of the eternal contest between the randomness of fate and the resilience of personality.

A remarkable book. An impressive debut.