Rating: 
Summary: (3.5) Secrets and lies...
Review: An interesting premise: a young man, about to leave the nest for college and a life of his own, accidentally discovers that his mother is having an extramarital affair. Via access to the lover's emails (which he prints out and saves in a huge file), he assumes the role of voyeur, daily witness to the unfolding romance. The Shaws are an unusual family with eclectic interests: Beth, the mother, is a career pianist of archaic compositions and husband Kevin is dedicated to historical reenactment of Civil War battles with his daughter, Elvira, a petulant tomboy.Henry grows ever more fascinated by his mother's secret and nurtures his own isolation, certain no one is privy to the affair but him. The object of Beth's Shaw's affection, Richard Polloco (or Rpoll), is a fellow musician with a romantically tragic past. Obsessed with the minutiae of the affair, Henry expends a great deal of youthful energy copying the electronic correspondence and pondering the exact meaning of Beth's disloyalty to the Shaws. This nuclear family is quite eccentric, from Beth's obscure musical career to historical reenactment, not to mention giving their children the names Henry and Elvira. It is, as well, a bit disturbing, even oedipal, that the son is driven to relentlessly spy on his mother. Subsequently, Henry's behavior changes radically. The formerly perfect son is in turns secretive, sarcastic and rude, and, in his heart, unforgiving. The awareness that a grown woman is writing the persona of a 17-year-old boy is often awkward and intrusive, and Henry frequently sounds prissy and middle-aged. But Hamilton makes use of inventive plot twists to resolve awkward situations and the family's very idiosyncrasies provide their ultimate salvation. In any case, the sooner Henry begins living out his own aspirations, the better for all concerned. When good sense finally prevails, both parents and children move smoothly beyond the disturbing behavior that nearly unravels them all.
Rating: 
Summary: Family life
Review: Jane Hamilton takes us within another Midwestern family through the eyes of Henry, the older son. It is written as a memory of his senior year in high school from the perspective of an adult. We see his pain, anger and confusion over his mother's affair. She is commuting from Chicago to Wisconsin to be with her violinist lover.
Henry is navigating through his senior year in high school in urban Chicago after the family has spent his earlier years in rural Vermont. His younger sister, Elvira, is a hard core Civil War re-enactor who is passing as a boy with her fellow soldiers. His father is a history teacher, whose unflagging optimism, Henry finds galling. His mother is a talented pianist who is making beautiful music with N Ukrainian violinist in Wisconsin.
Henry observes his mother's affair through reading her e-mails which he prints and keeps for posterity.
Ultimately it's the dynamics of relationships and what holds a family together that makes this an interesting and satisfying novel.
Rating:
Summary: This Mother is High.......
Review: This book is written about a 17-year old boy and how he deals with the knowledge that his 38-year old mother is having an affair. When I read this, I almost felt like I could be the mother if certain factors fell into place. When I told someone about the book, he asked me if I was contemplating an affair! The young man seems very emotionally healthy despite the chaos in his house. I have a 17 year old and he is a very good son. The author is clever with her descriptions and writes about some very funny situations. The ending seems reasonable, but I decided I couldn't leave the book around the house for my teenagers to read. I left it on a Delta airplane seat pocket if anyone wants it. ps/ The "adult" in the story is the son!
Rating:
Summary: Pick Up "Disobedience" and Go To Your Room!
Review: Has Jane Hamilton missed the mark with "Disobedience"? This seems the debate raging, at quick glance, with fellow Amazon reviewers. Having read all of Hamilton's previous works, initially my concern was that she had. This is more a continuation of the reflective feel of "A Short History of a Prince" and less of the more plot-driven "The Book of Ruth" and "A Map of the World." This is where perhaps the "boring" criticism comes from, as Henry is hopelessly obsessed with his mother Beth's affair with a fellow musician. As with "Prince," Hamilton tells the story with a male narrator. Whether Henry comes out sounding more like a middle-aged woman than a young man is certainly debatable, but with Hamilton's writing skill I found it hard to complain. Overall, "Disobedience" is a rich and thought-provoking work. First, there is the title. The easy leap to make is that the title refers to Beth's extramarital affair. But each character, in their own way, is "disobedient." Despite his mother's transgression, Henry's invasion of her e-mails would certainly not meet the "honor thy mother and father" criteria. Likewise, the sub-plot of Henry's sister's (Elvira) obsession with Civil War re-enactment only sets the stage for the many internal wars going on in the novel: a "typical" American family struggling to stay together, the battle of the sexes, and Henry's own struggle in becoming an adult. Certainly enough fodder for a book club, which Hamilton nicely skewers even after her own post-Oprah successes. While Hamilton appears to be losing some of her rabid fan-base with her last two novels, in my humble opinion, "Disobedience" is only further evidence that Hamilton has only continued to make her mark as one of the top contemporary American authors.
Rating: 
Summary: Thoughful presentation of "an old story"
Review: Disobedience, not deception, is the title of this intelligent and wry work by Jane Hamilton. At first glance, it is the wrong title: a teen son spies on the progress of his mother's love affair by reading, printing and filing her emails to and from her violin-making lover. But this work is too subtle and thoughtful for the obvious to predominate. As the mother writes of her own affair " This is an old story." The real story belongs to the son, Henry, who observes, but never quite confronts, his mother's year of disobedience, and never moves on past his own disobedience. This affair by the woman alternately called Liza38, Mrs. Shaw and Betty Shaw is less a betrayal of the father than the son - one email reveals a psychic has told his mother that mother and son were once husband and wife in a previous reincarnation. The father moves seemingly and cheerfully undisturbed by all this drama - a man his son hates for "nothing in particular if you don't count his passivity." In this odd family of four, the father and the daughter share a passion for history. The father, a history teacher, encourages Elvira to become with him participants in Civil War reenactments. More deceptions are required as the younger sister binds her breasts, cuts her hair and passes herself of as "Elviron" Ironically, it is the mother who protests this deceit and fears the results of its eventual discovery. Later, the "living historians" of the Battle of Shiloh play out their own modern melodrama of disobedience.
This book is as much about history - make that histories - made personal. The father teaches it, the sister is absorbed in trying to live in it, the son files and records - like a historian - his mother's email. It's what to do with all that history that trips the family up, especially the narrator. He presents the story of the year of the affair as if he were still a teen, watching it happen. We get his immediate reactions. But this is not a teen telling the story. What Henry does now, how he lives, loves or makes that living, is never told. We only get glimmers, by a device Ms. Hamilton uses to good effect, but ultimately overuses. When the narrator wishes to give perspective, or adult insight, or an alternative interpretation of the mother's actions, Henry tells us about the time he told this or that girlfriend about it and then tells us their reaction. We learn he was in film school only because he uses the emails in a project. And so it goes. Henry passively, keeps his distance from us as much as he does from his mother. Still, he is able, when it counts, to present his own disobedience
Rating:
Summary: get me out of this boy's mind
Review: This book made me a little crazy, spending page after page in the mind of a narrator dripping with angst who is a strange fusion of a teenage boy and the middle-aged author herself. Jane Hamilton's latest novel is trendy (e-mails and cross-dressing) and literary (oedipal allusions), but the bottom line is the narrative device of a teenage boy eavesdropping on his mother's e-mails does not work. An interesting exercise for a creative writing class maybe but this device becomes a straitjacket by the end of the book. Get me out of this boy's mind, I was screaming after 100 pages. There is only so much the author can convey via the e-mails so she resorts to the 17-year old boy fantasizing about his mother in bed with her extramarital lover. This is outlandish - I don't know anyone who ruminates about their parents' sex life - but even if it were remotely believable it is poor writing. The affair between the mother and the violinist has all the sizzle of day-old champagne after it has been filtered through the mutltiple layers of the twenty-something mind of Henry recollecting the sarcastic seventeen-year old Henry's reading of Liza's e-mails. We are just too far away from the action. This book bubbles with ideas but in the end it falls flat. Why do we re-tell the old story, why do we re-enact the past, and can we through disobedience change the direction of our lives or are we, like Oedipus, destined to act out what has already been scripted? Intriguing ideas, but unfortuneately what drives a good novel is not just ideas and words but a plot that makes us want to turn the page and characters we care about deeply. Stick with Book of Ruth and A Map of the World for books that do that.
Rating:
Summary: Anatomy of another quirky American family
Review: This engrossing and well-written novel is built around the apparent disobedience of several main characters to expected life commitments. Musician, wife, and mother Elizabeth, experiencing an apparent midlife crisis in which she rebels against the routine dullness of her life, seeks out an extramarital affair. Elvira, Elizabeth's daughter and the narrator's tomboy sister, rebels against the expectations that she embrace traditional femininity, instead immersing herself in the all-male world of Civil War reenactment. The story of how these manifestations of disobedience run their course is told by Henry, Elizabeth's seventeen-year-old son. As the story unfolds, Hamilton reveals her keen perception of the hypocrisy and falseness of much modern feminism. She skewers Elizabeth for her narcissistic, self-serving, and ultimately self-destructive adulterous behavior. Also, through the vehicle of "Book Club" discussions among a number of middle-aged women, she takes aim at the nonsensical, even poisonous nature of much of the blather that passes for "feminist discourse." So far, so good. Where the novel fails, however, is in the curious one-sidedness of its critique of the genders. In contrast to the way in which much contemporary writing by women attacks patriarchy (especially that practiced by white men), Hamilton's principal male characters here can practically do no wrong. They are unnaturally sensitive, thoughtful, wise, patient, and/or talented. Perhaps the greatest weakness of all, however, is Hamilton's ambitious but failed attempt to narrate the story in the "voice" of a young man in his mid-twenties. As other reviewers have suggested, in tone, style, and content, the narration resembles far more closely that of a forty-something woman. Despite its flaws, this definitely is a work worth reading. What's more, there is plenty of grist here for the book club or English class discussion mill. What is the symbolic significance of Richard Polloco's home being a Lincoln birthplace log cabin replica? Of all the ways that little sister Elvira might "rebel," why through Civil War reenactment? I don't know the answers to these questions and frankly, I'm kind of glad I didn't have to spend any great length of time wrestling with them. But for people who enjoy the literary-deep-meaning guessing game, I'm sure there's lot of potential for fun and excitement here.
Rating:
Summary: Disobedience
Review: A truly awesome piece of literary work full of poetic sentences that will either merely soothe you or leave you reeling. For those hours I read this book, I was a part of Henry and Liza38...I not only felt their pain and epiphanies, but also found myself putting words to mine for the first time ever. After I finished reading this novel, I hid out by myself, held the book to my chest, and said "WOW" over and over again. Then I went online on Amazon.com and ordered the last 2 novels by this amazing lady that I haven't yet read.:-)
This book will likely be with you LONG after you've read it.
Rating: 
Summary: Boring
Review: This is the first Jane Hamilton book I have ever read. I received Disobedience as a Christmas gift this year. Since I see the person who gave it to me (who wanted to read it herself)everyday, I knew that she would be watching me to see if I read it. I really tried to like it. Hamilton is undoubtly a talented writer, now if she only had something to write about. There are few books that I can't finish, unfortunately this is one of them. If I had to sum up my feelings for this book in one word it would be: BORING.
Rating:
Summary: A gifted writer
Review: I loved every paragraph of this book. The Shaws are an All-American, intellectually and musically gifted dysfunctional family and absolutely rang true to me through Henry's sharp wit. Jane Hamilton's "Book of Ruth" was a disturbing, powerful book about a poor, uneducated family unraveling to a terrible end. "Disobedience" is also about family relationships yet could not be more different than that earlier book, demonstrating, to me, Jane Hamilton's incredible range.
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