Books like Alice in Bed

The good-looking, deceptively buoyant girl in bed is Alice Brody, until now a sophomore at Sarah Lawrence and currently immobilized (it’s been weeks, soon months) in a hospital room in New York. Her legs won’t move (the pain coming in “hot waves, like acute embarrassment”). She’s in traction that looks to her like a late-night TV gadget (“It slices! It dices! It mashes! It whips!”). Dr. Witherspoons (famous attending physician to famous football teams) 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 father apologetically off to Vancouver to a new bride, a new life)… her mother, well-meaning and well-appointed (except for her new-found beau, who wears a diamond pinky ring), suddenly by herself, representing Family, sitting with Alice, every day, all day (starting and abandoning endless needlepoints), comforting and irritating her daughter… the specialists flown in for consultation (“The Dr. O’Solomon who wrote Cement and the Orthopod” and Dr. Onnen, who limps), patronizing and prodding her… her nurses fussing and her two doctor-lovers hovering around her—Dr. Davis (bearing violets, quoting Shakespeare, going all sultry) 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.