Adam and Eve and Pinch Me

Rating:
Summary: An amazing character, a mediocre plot
Review: A friend gave me a copy of the uncorrected proof of this novel, the second by this author I've read (the other being Vine's Gallowglass). I thought the portrait of Minty, the protagonist, was brilliantly presented. An obsessive-compulsive (and likely schizophrenic) nearing-forty woman, Minty is rendered not like the typical mentally-ill character (with cliched, oversimplified traits). Instead, we're given very compelling insights into what makes her tick. Other characters, though, are more thinly drawn and seem almost cartoonish. The plot, as others have noted, is also a bit thin, and ends in a way that I found anticlimactic. I guess I wanted it to resolve more fully the various subplots. But overall, the impression I'm left with is that Rendell knows how to write! Even while noticing the quibbles, I was compelled by the book's beautiful use of language.

Rating:
Summary: Dysfunction at its Finest!
Review: I found this a fascinating read, but more of a character study of dysfunction than a mystery.
At the heart of this story is Jock, also known as Jeff or Jerry, a ne'er do well always looking for a free lunch. His girlfriend du jour is always well-off, and willing to keep him.
The three women at the forefront of this novel have very little in common, except that they all have fallen head over heels for Jock, or Jerry, or whatever he decides his name is! What we do discover about these women, and those people who are close to them, are the various dysfunctions and quirks that manifest themselves as the story progresses.
I don't think I would characterize this book as a mystery, as there is very little kept secret from the reader. As a novel, however, it is very good, and Rendell's depictions of her characters are fascinating.

Rating:
Summary: "Go Away!" she hissed. Wish I'd taken heed...
Review: Minty should have taken her knife to this manuscript. At least half should have been cut. "A&E&PE" is a book both wandering and repetitious.

Over the course of this novel, the main character takes almost sixteen million baths. I counted! There's also long lists of meals prepared, detailed fashion descriptions of eighty thousand outfits, and in-depth cinema visit scenes for every film that appeared around the year 2000.

Pinch me?

No.

Pinch off half the chapters and there's be enough room for the amount of plot and character invested here. On second thought, pinch off half the characters too: there's little that's interesting or sympathetic to several of them, and their stories' impact on the main plot is tangential. At best.

In fairness: I was expecting a mystery. Perhaps I'm just disappointed that there was very little crime in this novel, no investigation (at all), and no doubt as to what the conclusion would hold. There's never a moment when "it all comes together," no long-awaited twist that would make the whole read worthwhile. Instead of surprises we have bath after bath after bath and a lot of weeping into hankies over failed relationships.

Two stars out of five.



Rating:
Summary: Redemption for Rendell after Grasshopper
Review: Nearly all of the reviews of Adam and Eve and Pinch Me, serve the prospective reader well in outlining the plot of this typically compelling psychological novel by Ruth Rendell. I was frankly concerned that perhaps Ms. Rendell had run out of steam after reading Grasshopper, a novel that I found disappointing and not up to her usual exemplary standards.

Now we have "Minty", Araminta Knox, another in a long line of Rendell's lost souls who become fascinating people with the strokes of her pen, people who would otherwise, in the real world, be invisible or avoided and mostly misunderstood. Poor Minty, dumped by an uncaring mother on a woman friend who was too decent to send her into care. Minty is also blessed with very few qualities that would ensure a happier future. She is pale, plain, thin, dim, self-centered, and possessed of a highly self-limiting obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. In addition to these unfortunate legacies, Minty is now beginning to hear voices and see ghosts.

How Ruth Rendell can take these blighted people, weave the most rewarding stories around their bleak lives, and leave us wanting more is pure genius. A person who suffers from an obsessive-compulsive disorder such hoarding, or absurd cleanliness is not just a lovable eccentric with a few quirks. Inevitably, their obsessions drive people away as the sufferer goes on, except in few cases, untreated. Personality and Obsessive-Compulsive disorders are very serious conditions and Minty's unfortunate lack of mental health and treatment are the norm in our world.

It takes a brilliant writer to be able to use such misery as the foundation for a most enjoyable and wonderfully plotted novel. It is to Ms. Rendell's credit that she has been plying us with at least three genres of fiction throughout her career, very ably and without becoming unpleasantly formulaic.

Rating:
Summary: Riveting Portrait of Madness
Review: Ruth Rendell excels in her ability to describe-and shade-the various forms of madness as well as mental illness.
"Adam and Eve and Pinch Me" tells the tale of "Jock Lewis"-also known by several other aliases-who charms various women into believing he is their one and only. And he does this all at the same time. His victims include Fiona, a hardworking merchant banker; Natalie, a sharp journalist; Zillah, the mother of his two children and the only one who is totally on to him (and also his legal wife); and most memorably, Minty, an obsessive compulsive woman who works in a dry cleaning store. Various other sharply drawn characters surround the main ones including Fiona's married neighbors, an anorexic man and his obese wife.

The book focuses on the disappearance-and reappearance-of Jock and his subsequent murder. In many ways, despite his ne'er to do ways, he seems the most stable individual in the entire book. Much of "Adam and Eve and Pinch Me" is spent on the impact of his behavior on those around him and the choices these individuals are forced to make (Zillah, for instance, enters into a bigamous marriage with a gay politician to support her children.)

I recommend this book for those individuals who are fans of Rendell's and the English mystery genre. I caution readers that this is not your typical "Who dunnit?"--in many ways it is a "Why did he or she do it and who else could have?"

Rating:
Summary: Another look at madness
Review: Ruth Rendell has always tackled madness with remarkable skill, and in Adam and Eve and Pinch Me she brings us in close to Minty, a young woman suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder and being pushed closer and closer to the edge by voices in her head and hallucinations which at times appear as real to her as the people around her.

Minty is not the only character in this book. There is also Jock, or Jeff, or Jerry Leach, depending on whom you ask, a rather charming young man who befriends women, only to disappear with their money. He has befriended Minty, only to desert her by pretending to get himself killed in a train wreck. Before that, he has befriended, and in one case married, a whole string of other women, several of whom find their way into this book, along with their own sets of problems. But the story belongs to Minty. It begins and ends with her, and with the horrible but inevitable acts she commits while battling her hallucinations. She knows Jeff is dead, but his ghost won't leave her alone and she's desperate. She knows she must get rid of him ... and she does.

Adam and Eve and Pinch Me did not blow me away. In fact, there were times when it did not seem like Rendell's writing. Many of her characters came across more like caricatures than real people, especially Matthew and his wife. I did not find myself growing especially attached to any of the bizarre parade marching through these pages. I did, however, read the book all the way through, something that doesn't happen so much now that I've gotten more fussy, and, even if I did find disbelief hard to suspend at times, I was never bored. Rendell is certainly a master at her craft, and while Adam and Eve and Pinch Me is not her best work, it is still an excellent read.

Rating:
Summary: A Great Tale
Review: Ruth Rendell has earned several Edgar awards including a Grand Master Award for the crafting of brilliant mysteries. In "Adam and Eve and Pinch Me", she is again in top form. However, this is not really a mystery. You are told who commits the murder. This is rather a romp through a world of madness, illusion and deceit.

The suspense is created by watching and waiting for the police to discover the killer. The allure of the story lies in the actions of the multidimensional characters that Rendell has created. Each character has some secrete hidden away waiting to be discovered.

The story revolves around a wonderfully charming, devastatingly handsome and amoral conman Jock also known as Jerry Leach or Jeff Leigh. The trouble all starts when Jock's obsessive-compulsive girlfriend, Minty, thinks he is killed in a train crash. She becomes certain that his ghost is following her around and is determined to rid herself of the apparition.

However, Jock isn't dead but very much alive. He staged his death to move on to another unsuspecting lady, a successful banker. His only legal wife knows that he is really alive but she sees this false death as a chance for her to marry a wealthy conservative member of Parliament, who is also hiding a secrete that could ruin his political career.

The story begins to build toward its climax when Jock is found stabbed to death in a cinema. As his death is discovered and the hunt for the killer begins, Jack's lies unravel exposing not only his secrets but also those of the people around him. These discovered truths will destroy some lives, but it will rebuild others.

I enjoyed this book tremendously and I recommend it highly.

Judith Woolcock Colombo: Author of The Fablesinger & Night Crimes

Rating:
Summary: Fabulous Conundrum
Review: Ruth Rendell has produced another masterpiece. The main characters are three women who are all victims of a cad. He is married to one and engaged to the other two at various points in the novel. The lives of the three women, and those of their friends and neighbors in London, entwine and tangle through numerous plots and subplots. The bad guy gets his comeuppance in a most unexpected way, and in the end two of the women find a measure of peace, with the third becoming the last and saddest victim of all.

Rating:
Summary: Uncare leads to crime
Review: Ruth Rendell writes detective stories that are anything but detective stories. This book is the perfect example of this transformation of the genre. We are not interested in the police investigation for a very simple reason : the book is not about it since we, the readers, know everything from the very first page. It shows how haphazard and accidental an investigation is. The main interest of this book is the deep study of the psychology of the characters, and first of all of the murderer. Ruth Rendell depicts a serial killer that cannot be profiled in the FBI way. She is just « mad », out of her mind, mentally impaired. She kills in a complete delusion because she lives in a complete delusion and killing is not killing : it is getting rid of haunting ghosts. Just for that reason the book is fascinating. But the book is also richer than any in the genre because of the deep study of several human types who reveal how our democratic and free societies work. It is, in a way, a severe denunciation of several categories of people who do not make our society better but make it definitely worse, particularly for those who do not have a simple, humdrum, gullible, submissive and obedient psyche and life. It debunks the press and the media and the way they become vultures when they want to make money with a scoop that they have to find, or when they want to make money by selling millions of copies regardless of the harm they may cause to their subject people, their victims. The book exposes the rich and powerful who think they can do anything they want because they can buy it, buy a wife to cover up their private life, buy silence or buy information, buy cars or houses or just some woman to take care of them, and the worst way of buying is not with money but with your good looks, if you are a man just as well as if you are a woman. It finally denunciates the attitude of a few in our society who are ready to do anything to get their hands on some comfort, money or anything they consider important. Social climbing is the worst think a society like ours can endure, and this exists because our society does not provide honest means to achieve something if you do not have the money, the power or the luck necessary to start with. Social services are at stake and they do not come out clean in this book because they do not solve problems, they only contain them. So the book is full of what the Americans would call « grotesque » people : too obese, too thin, too unbalanced, too rich, too afraid of public exposure for nothing but their free private life, etc. But Ruth Rendell seems to be an optimist. After all most of these grotesque characters find a normal and decent way out of their grotesqueness. Most of them, except a few, the victims of the system that makes some of us innocent victims of uncare, like the children in the book, or innocent victims of neglect, the neglect of professionals who should see, who do see and yet do nothing, like in that case the murderer who is known as deranged by a doctor, a policeman, many other people, including her employer, but no one for one reason or another tries to bring her the help she needs in her difficult situation that cannot be solved without this outside help : the irony of this situation is that this lack of care leads to two dead people, many others haunted and severely annoyed by police procedures that lead nowhere, and a lot of wasted energy, love, peace of mind and plain peace « in the valley » if I can say so. What costs or would cost more to society ? To repair the damage caused by this lack of care or the necessary work to prevent it ? Where is the limit between prying into other people's private business and preventing personal disorder or sickness, public disorder and even crime ?

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU


Rating:
Summary: Rendell certainly isn't mellowing with age!
Review: This is another absolute winner from Ruth Rendell, my favourite novelist of all time. Of all her books, this is possibly her very very best. It is an amazing portrait of damaged characters forced into dangerous situations, the results of which can only be a tragedy. She displays the catastrohpic inevitability of events already set in motion with a depressing and disturbing reality. It is unsetlling to think that already our lives could be on course for a crash, by perhaps being set to meet a character similar to those in her books...those characters whose smallest actiosn can bring their own worlds, and the worlds od those around them, falling to the ground.
She describes contemporary life excellently, and she draws her characters perfectly. Their downright weirdness is entirely realistic, which comes as a surprise, and a pleasure, as many authors are not able to write authentically and realisticaly about the kinds of characters that Rendell does.

The plot is complex, and at the end she draws all the strands tightly together with the ability of the seasoned and consumate professional that she is. It's a thrilling and entirely suspenseful book, the type of suspense that only Rendell seems capable of creating, via the slow yet enthralling unravelling of her plots. The addition of aspects of the supernatural into the plot only add another layer of chilliness and strangeness to this brilliant book. The mystery and supernatural threads compliment each other incredibly well. The climax is understated and shocking, leaving us, as do all the best books, wanting to know more about the characters and what is to happen to them.

It is also written so well that it should please not just any fan of Rendell, or just any kind of crime fiction, but anyone interested in more "literary" fiction. Rendell has deserved the Booker prize for many of her books, this one is no exception, and it is a great injustice that she will not get it. I long for the day when the literary world recognises the true talent of Ruth Rendell.