Rating: 
Summary: The poor decisions made to alleviate loneliness
Review: If you're over the age of, say, twenty, THE PURSUIT OF ALICE THRIFT probably won't tell you anything you haven't already learned in the demanding School of Relationships.
Alice Thrift, M.D., is a hapless first-year surgical resident at a Boston teaching hospital. Expected to work a zillion-hour week, she doesn't have a life outside her scrubs. She's the epitome of boring. Her only contact with the outside world is her platonic male roomy and friend, Leo, an extremely popular pediatric RN at the same institution. Alice doesn't have a boyfriend, much less a pet goldfish.
One day while rotating through Plastic Surgery, Alice is consulted by a forty-year old widower, Ray Russo, seeking advice about a nose job. After being talked out of it, Ray embarks on his romantic pursuit of Thrift. Russo is a fudge salesman. Or so he says. He's also extraordinarily glib, and, obviously to everyone but Alice, up to something.
The problem with THE PURSUIT OF ALICE THRIFT is threefold. The ending is revealed on page 6 when Thrift tells the reader that Ray is a "LIAR", and that they had a failed marriage. One only reads further in hope of learning the sordid details. Secondly, Alice is numbingly ordinary. Having that goldfish, or even a tabletop ant farm, might have made her more interesting. And her social interactions with more socially developed friends and colleagues are only marginally amusing. Finally, since this is a story about the poor decisions a person makes to escape the throes of loneliness, it shouldn't be revelation to any reasonably contemplative individual beyond adolescence. Indeed, on finishing this novel, the average reader should be able to state, "Yup. Been there; done that; will likely do it again."
THE PURSUIT OF ALICE THRIFT isn't a bad book, just decidedly so-so.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting, but comic?
Review: It was a new experience, reading a novel through without once caring one way or another about the protagonist. Alice Thrift has so little personality of any kind, it's difficult to think of her at all, either with affection or ill-will.However, this book is being marketed as a comic novel, and I don't believe I found any of it amusing in any way at all. The only emotion I recall registering was mild melancholy (because Alice Thrift seems to represent a banal mean seen in too many people these days who mistake a job for a life). Perhaps I prefer a bit more aggression in my comic novelists (Patrick Dennis, Dawn Powell, Jonathan Coe, P.G. Wodehouse), but I don't think this is comedy.
Rating: 
Summary: Breezy, Witty Fun
Review: Joe Keenan meets Susan Issacs in this charming novel about a likable but socially inept surgical intern who meets the man of not quite her dreams. Her suitor, a middle aged fudge salesman, pursues her with hilarious vigor, but it's her reactions to her circumstances that make the story so funny. This was the first book I've read by Elinor Lipman, and if her other books are as enjoyable as this one, I'll certainly be reading them!
Rating:
Summary: Waiting for the laughs
Review: My book club selected this book because we wanted something funny to read. With the turn of every page I wondered if this is where the laughs would begin. They never came. Alice is a depressed character, and perhaps it's a tribute to Lipman's writing that she manages to depress the reader. There is delight to be found in the cast of supporting characters, even though more of them are despicable than likable. On a technical note about the writing style, I found it very difficult to read the conversations when only about half of the spoken dialogue is in quotes. Backing up and rereading whole paragraphs was required to discern actions from thoughts from speech. Despite the drawbacks, "The Pursuit of Alice Thrift" is actually a good story that draws you in. A fast read that keeps you turning pages to find out what happens next and in the end. Overall I give it three stars: I'd recommend it in paperback for beach reading this summer.
Rating:
Summary: Mixed Bag
Review: Started reading this book and thought it was adorable - really light and fun...just when it was getting really good the story seemed to stop. What happened? I loved Inn at Lake Devine and Lipman's writing is delightful, but I was really disappointed that the last 1/3 of the book seemed to miss something.
Rating:
Summary: Mixed Bag
Review: Started reading this book and thought it was adorable - really light and fun...just when it was getting really good the story seemed to stop. What happened? I loved Inn at Lake Devine and Lipman's writing is delightful, but I was really disappointed that the last 1/3 of the book seemed to miss something.
Rating: 
Summary: deliciously classic lipman
Review: Thank God, more Elinor Lipman! Her latest gem is the story of the initiation into simple humanity of Alice Thrift, a brilliant but socially-challenged surgical resident who has all the instinctive people skills of a chilly stethoscope. The paradoxical inversion of Lipman's usual lucidly insightful heroines works to perfection here; Alice's cluelessness is itself a kind of x-ray vision and Lipman is as hilariously wise about men and women as ever. Alice's insanely persistent suitor, the sublimely slimy Ray Russo, is a perverse delight; watching the twists and turns of the courtship is like watching a car wreck in slow motion, but it dawns on us slowly that this is precisely the car wreck Alice needed. The novel's minor characters are realized wonderfully, and the delicious unfolding process of naive Alice's education in the intricacies of actual human beings is pure joy. I can't agree that this falls short of Lipman's usual wonders; it's simply a delightful read, laced with laugh-out-loud dialogue pitched to perfection and all the treasures of Lipman's effortlessly graceful style. She is our Jane Austen and hurray there's more of her now to read.
Rating:
Summary: Real characters
Review: The characters in this novel are what keep the reader interested. You enjoy hearing about them and at times feel like they are just like people you know. Elinor Lipman has been one of my favorite authors for years. I was not dissapointed with her latest work.
Rating:
Summary: another Lipman attempt at literature
Review: The problem with Elinor Lipman's novels, and this one is no exception, is that she is trying to write literature but she just can't make the grade. She's just not that good. She's solidly amusing -- her characters are funny and her plots are antic, and it's all charming, like old B movies, but she is clearly aiming higher. It's as if Seinfeld were trying to be Philip Roth. There are some nice moments in this novel with an almost Aspergerian main character who just doesn't understand how people are, but it's yet another slight entertainment from the pen of a writer who seems trapped between genres.
Rating:
Summary: Lipman succeeds in exploring new themes
Review: The typical Elinor Lipman book involves a discovery or rediscovery of a relationship from the main character's past: a missing parent or sibling, old high school friends, acquaintances or enemies. In Alice Thrift, though, she has created a main character without a past--she was too busy studying to have one--and thus Lipman explores an entirely new theme: how to create a personality for the first time in your late 20's. As always Lipman effortlessly creates an environment that feels both familiar and real, here a teaching hospital in Boston. Aware of her lack of bedside manner or really any empathy for other people, Alice is frustrated and alone. She doesn't realize that the people who care about her--first her roommate Leo and then her hallmate Sylvie and a kindly OB--are the ones who are helping her to develop a personality and interests, and instead credits the changes in her to Ray Russo, the obviously evil patient turned suitor (we learn they will marry and the marriage will not last before we learn anything else; Lipman is interested in characters, not plot twists). Nobody loves Raymond (sorry, I couldn't resist), but Alice's huge blindspots where her personality should be give her no defenses to him, and she is unable either to resist him or to ask herself the most obvious questions about his behavior. Yet she runs away first from Leo when he turns out to have a girl friend (who is obviously wrong for him, but--in a twist that shows Lipman is writing about people, not "characters"--nonetheless a good person who helps Alice discover her own strengths as a doctor) and from Sylvie when she flirts with Leo. Yet she only discovers that running from Ray is in her best interests at the last moment. It is a tribute to the self-confidence and self-awareness she has developed over the course of the novel that she is able to turn the tables on Ray even before Sylvie and Leo bust him for his lies. This is a far less crowded novel than Lipman's previous effort, The Dearly Departed, and while not as passionate or fully-realized as The Inn at Lake Devine (which is simply a masterpiece), it is a small, but wonderful achievement in its own right.
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