Eve's Apple - Hardcover

Rosen, Jonathan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679448160 ISBN 13: 9780679448167

Publisher: Random House, 1997

Synopsis

This poignant story of a vulnerable young woman, her lover, and the devastating disease that both unites and threatens to destroy them offers a raw and sentimental journey into the dark world of hunger and denial. Eve's Apple is an unforgettable first novel, an intricate meditation on the nature of hunger--for food, for knowledge, and for love.

About this title

About the Author

Jonathan Rosen is the cultural editor of The Forward and creator of the newspaper's Arts and Letters section.

From the Inside Flap

t story of a vulnerable young woman, her lover, and the devastating disease that both unites and threatens to destroy them offers a raw and sentimental journey into the dark world of hunger and denial. Eve's Apple is an unforgettable first novel, an intricate meditation on the nature of hunger--for food, for knowledge, and for love.

Reviews

YA. Joseph, a young man adrift in New York City, is anchored only by his love for the beautiful, enigmatic Ruth Simon. As a teenager, she almost starved herself to death and the simple act of eating still torments her. Joseph decides to save his bulimic girlfriend as he attempts to unravel the mystery of hunger and denial during hours of research in the reading room of the public library. In the process, he finds himself more and more obsessed with her illness. This poignant, sometimes funny first novel offers a meditation on hunger and longing: for food, for knowledge, and for love. By choosing Joseph as the protagonist of the novel, Rosen softens a dark subject by showing the couple's tender and unforgettable struggle. Readers also meet the brilliant Dr. Flek, a former psychoanalyst, who believes that the rise of civilization is based on its ability to tame food; Ruth's eccentric mother; and an array of delightful Russian immigrants and coworkers in the English language school where Joseph teaches. Thoughtful, mature young adults will enjoy this tale of the foibles of an enabler who learns the dangers of helping too much and finally triumphs by realizing the errors of his ways.?Pat Bangs, Fairfax County Public Library, VA
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

An elegantly written debut offers an erudite analysis of eating disorders in a less-than-persuasive fictional structure. With a self-absorbed heroine, and a hero only slightly more sympathetic to the reader, the love story here, intended to explicate the psycho-medical theme, never catches fire. The real heart of the novel is essentially a long and often intellectually provocative essay on the varieties of hunger--for love, fame, acceptance, and the manner in which young women, especially, respond to them. Joseph and Ruth first meet in college; after graduating, they move into an apartment in New York. Joseph teaches English to Russian immigrants; Ruth, whose father pays her rent and Visa bills, wants to be an artist. She's also obsessed with her weight and has been hospitalized for anorexia. As the story opens, Joseph is beginning to suspect that Ruth is suffering a recurrence: She exercises compulsively, eats very little, and behaves erratically in restaurants. Ernest Flek, a psychologist and a friend of Ruth's divorced mother, gives the concerned Joseph a list of books to read. The list is not only eclectic--ranging from basic texts on anorexia to Kenneth Clark's study The Nude--but suggests the wider implications of eating disorders. As Joseph becomes more and more involved--he spends all of his free time researching the subject--Flek suggests that he must learn to deal with his own hungers and demons before he can help Ruth. Joseph resists, until Ruth leaves for France. As he struggles with his fears, migraines, and guilt, he eventually comes to understand that he was not responsible for his teenage sister's suicide, and that his obsessive need to monitor Ruth's illness has more to do with his own needs than hers. Ruth returns ill, but the two are ready to fight their problems together. More research than romance, which is disappointing, because Rosen can write. It's the ideas, though, not the characters, that have life here. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Joseph, the obsessive narrator of Rosen's perceptive and beautifully written debut novel, describes his lover's eating disorder as "unrequited hunger," a poetic phrase indicative of his identification with and romanticization of her dangerous illness. Ruth and Joseph, both young and adrift, have just started living together, and Joseph, who teaches English to Russian immigrants, finds that he cannot suppress his desire (his hunger) to know everything possible about Ruth's problematic relationship with food. He becomes a spy in their house of love, reading her diary, searching through the trash, and violating the privilege of intimacy by scrutinizing her body with nearly forensic attention. As Rosen gradually reveals Joseph's compulsion as an unconscious effort to suppress his own troubles (unresolved grief over the suicide of his sister and estrangement from his parents), he explores the subtle, often dangerous shifts in power between the well and the unwell as each seeks the strengths and weaknesses of the other. This psychological drama full of surprises is positively operatic in its emotiveness, thematic evolution, and beautiful resolution. Donna Seaman

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679448160
• ISBN 13: 9780679448167
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 309