The Pursuit of Alice Thrift

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: Alice, me and an airplane ride from Boston to Kansas City...
Review: What a great afternoon I had - stuck on the runway at Logan Airport, then stuck at the gate during my connect in Milwaukee. Thanks to Elinor Lipman's most recent novel, it was all good. There are so many great things about The Pursuit of Alice Thrift, including Lipman's trademark snappy dialogue and sharp first-person perspective. And when Alice begins to transform, the story really begins to fly (even when my planes were earthbound). One tiny shortcoming: It all seems to wrap up a bit too rapidly in those final 20 pages. But by that point, I was sorry to leave the story, so maybe the rapid-fire conclusion was tainted by my own regrets. Elinor Lipman is one of my very favorites, and Alice Thrift is now one of my very favorite Lipman creations.

Rating:
Summary: Depressing and amusing simultaneously
Review: You pretty much know at the beginning how the story will end. The book is more about how the characters got there.

Alice is very literal and technically smart, but she's also naive and tends to take an anthropological approach to people. She's capable of developing a few social skills, but she never really had an incentive to try to before her career was threatened. She's not that much different at the end of the book, but the small gain in social skills and her attempts to reach out eventually move her from complete-outcast to nice-but-kooky.

Ray's a bit of a Rorschach test. My boyfriend's cynical and discrete, and he found Ray horribly obnoxious in the beginning. I'm naive and indiscrete, and while I found Ray to be a bit obnoxious in the beginning, I could see how Alice eventually ended up walking down the aisle with him. The main scuzz signals pre-marriage are that he only carried around $50 bills at first and an attitude/emotions that seems a bit weird when compared to the story he's telling. But he buys her things she needs, brings food to her, helps her make friends, and is generally very nice to her.

Since it's from Alice's perspective, you don't always get all the facts, because only Alice's observations and what she finds interesting are passed along. Since you're stuck in her head and she has no self-esteem at first, the book's depressing and amusing at the same time. Although a number of events occur in the book, the drama's fairly low key (what do you expect from Alice?), so there's a sense of not much happening sometimes. I thought the second half moved a lot faster and was more interesting and funnier than the first half.