About the Author:
Susanna Kaysen is also the author of the novel Far Afield and Girl, Interrupted, a memoir. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
From Publishers Weekly:
This is an exceptionally well-written, polished, curious novel, ostensibly about the love affair between the passionate Jewish narrator, Dinah Sachs, and her WASPish boss, Asa Thayer, a blond, soulless man whose people "think their great-great-grandfathers sprang fully evolved on these shores, products of the Mayflower's timber and New Hampshire rock." The account of the actual affair is sketchy and intriguing, and almost two-thirds of the book is devoted to a description of Asa's teenaged friendship with and attraction to Reuben Sola, a handsome, daredevil, Jewish esthete who dies by accident while climbing a bridge for the thrill of it. For all the author's observations about Asa and the attempt to use Reuben's life and death to explain Asa's distance from others, Asa remains a blurred figure. This is unfortunate: the reader would like to understand him beyond cultural cliches, and the author might have offered a more effective portrait had she focused on Dinah and Asa rather than Reuben and Asa.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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