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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780312424367 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Picador |
| Publication date: | 08/04/2004 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Sales rank: | 152,812 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.72(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Winter
The first thing Carol Simon does when she enters a room is water the plants. It doesn't matter whose house it is, she runs around sticking her fingers in flowerpots, and, if things are dry, she finds the kitchen and emerges carrying a glass of water. She's like an animal staking out territory. And because I was living with her daughter, she may have felt a special urge to lay a claim to our place. Her daughter, Ruth, sat glowering beside me with a shawl over her shoulders — huddled, shy, enraged.
"Mother, sit down," she said between her teeth. "You're being rude."
"Not at all," her mother said. "I'm doing you a favor. I've never seen plants in such terrible shape — it may be too late for them."
The plants were indeed starved. The coleus had lost its purple, the leaves of the ferns were edged with brown, and the spider plant, in its crisp dying, looked alert, as if it had been watered with coffee.
"I hope you don't treat him like the plants," she said, stretching out her arms and dragging the cat toward her. The plants were Ruth's. The cat, Max, was mine.
"No," said Ruth, "Max eats like a horse. I don't think he's really a cat. I think he's some other animal in disguise."
Max could eat the cream cheese off a bagel in the time it took to answer the telephone. He would jump over the serrated tops of shopping bags and land face-first in the groceries as soon as the bags were set on the floor. And Ruth hated him for it. He was like her hunger gone out of her — prowling in the kitchen, nosing in the cabinets, leaping on the table at dinnertime. He gave away the secret of her appetite. And if I had learned anything about Ruth in the time we were together, it was this appalling mystery that at first I refused to believe — that she was always hungry.
Max's gray bulk lay purring on Mrs. Simon's lap, and as she stroked him she talked about movies. Mrs. Simon had recently finished a PhD in film theory, and much of her time was spent in screening rooms.
She was an attractive, energetic woman with abundant, unruly red hair. It was, Ruth had assured me, her natural color, and though I preferred the muted fire of Ruth's own auburn wavelets, there was something mesmerizing about her mother's high-voltage hair. She had a strong, faintly freckled face and her gaze was keen and attentive — the kind of absorbed, giving gaze professors focus on in class and direct their lectures to. Apparently more than one professor had focused on it in the last twelve years, and the list of her affairs had grown longer than the course catalog.
Movies and sex. To hear Ruth tell it, ever since her mother gave up being a housewife to go back to graduate school when Ruth was a little girl, her mother seldom came out of the dark. Her degree coincided almost perfectly with her divorce, so that by the time her dissertation was approved the final papers were ready for her signature at the lawyer's, and she was ready for a new life.
Despite lost time, she obviously had a good career ahead of her. She was in her mid-forties, having married right out of college, and though Ruth remembered days from childhood when her mother could not get out of bed, she was clearly full of energy now. Carol Simon had played field hockey at Wellesley and there was a restless athleticism about her, a vitality that recalled for me a photo Ruth had of her mother, taken in the early sixties, that showed her at a team practice. Wielding her hockey stick like a scythe, hair aflame, she looked, in her high socks and pleated skirt, more like a Highland warrior than a college sophomore. The picture stirred in Ruth the same ambivalent admiration that most of her mother's achievements evoked.
It was hard not to admire Carol Simon. The glow of success was on her. Her dissertation, "Here's Looking at You, Kid: Images of Women in the Cinema," had been published by Harvard University Press. Her position at a small college in Boston was untenured but secure. As she immodestly told us, "I virtually am the film department." She attended conferences all over the country and received invitations to film festivals in France, Austria, Venice, from which she returned looking younger, more exotically intellectual, and, despite hours of consecutive viewing in dark theaters, as tan as her fair complexion allowed. She even wrote a column, "Talking Pictures," which appeared in a small journal once a month.
And how did Ruth feel about her mother's academic adventure?
"She wanted to have her kids and eat them, too," she told me once, bitterly. "She wanted to escape, which is fine, except that I had already been born. How could I compete with Katharine Hepburn when I was only five?"
Ruth could not forgive her mother for abandoning her to frozen dinners, to public transportation, to an empty house when school was over. And she could not forgive herself for not forgiving her mother. She wanted a mother who was educated. She wanted a mother who worked. She wanted a mother who was independent — after all, she wanted these things for herself: was it fair to deprive her mother? But try as she might, she could not root out an implacable longing for a storybook mother, someone who would love her above all, who would fill the kitchen with warm food smells, who would tuck her in, who would convert her own suffering into love energy. And that was why she wanted me.
I had mastered the ability to banish the ghost of sadness from my own life, and Ruth no doubt sensed this power in me. People have always valued me for my calm exterior, for my carefully cultivated optimism. In my self-persuading cheerfulness I brushed aside all Ruth's fears and warnings. Little did she realize that darker desires lurked in me as well. I did not know it myself. Ruth's illness seemed the sole obstacle to our happiness, not the source of my fascination. It was only much later that I came to see that Ruth, hoping for health, unleashed the opposite in me. At the time I would not have believed it. I told myself I was an ordinary young man and in large measure that was true. The tormented, the obsessed, the needy filled me with fear. But Ruth filled me with desire.
Even as she sat at the table fighting the demons riding on her fork, weighing down her food and giving her face a damned and distant look, even then I could not take my eyes off her. She suffered during every meal, I knew it deep in my gut, and I monitored her with unnatural attention. I felt her moods the way a blind man feels a face — some part of me was pressed up close against her, always, reading her, feeling the contours of her emotions, her thoughts, her moods, her hunger. She shrank at times from the grope of my intuition, but at other times she posed for it, holding herself up for my inspection, baring her misery like nudity that has put aside shame.
Not tonight, though. Ruth barely spoke during the meal with her mother. She sat hunched over her food, focused on her plate, staring at the troubled surface of her own reflected beauty. Her face wore a look of complete and painful absorption, unappeasable and unappeasing. When she looked at me that way my blood froze. But she had no eyes for me at all during dinner.
She looked down as if she were enchanted, working her food slowly across her plate, slowly onto the fork, slowly into her mouth, observing a thousand invisible rituals I could only guess at. Her face had grown very white, as if hunger made it incandescent. Ruth stared at her plate, and I stared at Ruth — Narcissus and Echo, frozen on the brink of a transformation. I felt that at any moment we might both become flowers and that Mrs. Simon would water us on her way out.
Mrs. Simon seemed oblivious of her daughter as she ate. She talked on unperturbed — a lively talker, a wonderful eater. She was teaching a class on women in cinema, which she called "All About Eve."
"Of course the kids call it "Chicks in Flicks," but what can you expect?" She laughed. "I know the guys take it so they can see Marilyn Monroe movies, but I like to think I'll get to them in the end. If they could only understand how horrible it is to be stuck in a movie, a whole generation of women imprisoned in a permanent image — of femininity, expectation, desire. These films are there forever, and what scares me most is that we love them, we return to them, we fall back into them so easily. The lights go down and we start with the old roles all over again."
We had moved into the living room, full of furniture plundered from Ruth's parents' home — the spoils of divorce supplemented with chairs rescued from the sidewalks of fancy neighborhoods. It looked comfortable enough, I thought, with Mrs. Simon seated expansively in an armchair, Ruth on the couch beside me and Max cruising below our feet. He nosed Ruth's foot and jumped into her lap. She had no patience for him, and after stroking him absently a few times, dumped him back onto the floor. She was, I knew, still thinking about dinner, reviewing each bite in her mind, like a chess master replaying a finished game.
"I'm tired," said Ruth. She lay back on the long couch, her head on the armrest, and shut her eyes. I wondered if she looked like this in analysis, lying on her back, peopling the room with her troubles — with her mother and Max, with me.
Looking down, I was struck by how much she resembled her mother. Seen from above, Ruth's face, white and very still, appeared infinitely older. With gravity sinking the shut eyes, darkening them, and pulling at the corners of her mouth, she looked like her mother's death mask. But then she stirred and stretched and the dreadful vision passed. Really, she was beautiful.
For a woman who was always hungry, Ruth kept herself in excellent shape. She was slender-waisted and, despite full hips and strong legs, delicately proportioned. She was five foot six, appeared even taller beside me (for I am barely five foot nine) and bore herself with elegant grace. But though not as tall or broad-shouldered as her mother, Ruth had a sturdiness about her that she resented. It resided in her bones, beyond the reach of diet or exercise. Nevertheless, the needle of the scale was always at 112 pounds. She lived by the scale, regulating herself not by appetite but by sheer will. It amazed me that she could remain true to this ideal, adding to or subtracting from herself like someone weighing meat in a delicatessen, throwing on or taking away slices as necessary. I often wondered how she managed it.
She had no inner sense of her body at all — she felt either cavernously starved or else stuffed and obese. When I insisted that no one saw her as she saw herself, it enraged her. I felt sometimes that her body was real only to me. Her own view of herself had nothing to do with the soft, solid reality I laid my head against at night. I felt sometimes that her body and I had an agreement that excluded Ruth. Thinking this way was unsettling, as if I were cheating on her.
* * *
Mrs. Simon was still talking, her long legs stretched out before her, her feet up on an ottoman. She had removed her shoes, and I looked at her over the webbed toes of her stockinged feet. I knew that it was Ruth's father who paid the gigantic bill from Dr. Hallo, her analyst, but I could not believe that Mrs. Simon had managed to put her daughter's sad history completely out of her mind.
So when Ruth left to go to the bathroom, I was not surprised when Mrs. Simon leaned toward me and said, dropping her voice to a whisper, "How is she? Still so gloomy? Still troubled?"
Her feet were on the floor now, and her hand was on my leg. She kept it there as if she were afraid I would follow Ruth out of the room. The distance she leaned across pitched her toward me in an almost desperate way; her face was upturned and the smell of her perfume misted around me.
"She is doing all right, isn't she? Ruth and I don't communicate very well just now, so you tell me." She laid her freckled hand on my thigh.
"Don't let her seduce you," Ruth had told me that afternoon before her mother arrived, and I'd laughed. But here was Carol Simon, squaring her padded shoulders like one of Hollywood's powerful women of the 1940s, looking at me hard under extended lashes. If she had pulled a cigarette holder out of her little gold bag, loaded it and lit up with an embossed lighter I wouldn't have been a bit surprised.
"What's wrong, Joseph? If you know something, give it to me straight."
"I think a lot of her gloominess has to do with you," I said at last. "Why don't you ask her how she is? I think all she really wants is for you to treat her like ... for you to act like a ..."
I faltered, and Mrs. Simon said, still whispering, "A mother?"
The word had a bitter sound.
"Listen, Joseph, I know Ruth blames me for most of her problems. I know she's in analysis. But is she going to spend the rest of her life chewing over something she bit off in childhood? The answers, believe me, are not in the past. She has to look to the future. Look at me — I had a miserable childhood and a narrow, dull marriage and now I've changed. Changed!
"She's a grown woman," she continued. "You should see that. What does she need me for? Besides, she's got you. You're wonderful for her. I can see that in one meal. You're a nourisher. Marry her. You're better for her than I could ever be."
And then she looked at her watch.
"Oh my, I've really got to get out of here. Honey!" she called in a loud voice. "Ruthie, I'm leaving." And, turning to me, she said, "Be a dear and find her, please." She began to gather herself up, looking about for her shoes. "I've got to go this instant."
I rose and went into the long hall that led to the bathroom, and there, at the end of it, stood Ruth, balanced as if listening in on a conversation inside the bathroom. All I heard as I approached was the hiss of plumbing.
She looked up, startled, when I was almost before her. She seemed hunched, contracted, like a frightened child. There was something consumptive about her, something pitiful, and for some reason this made me want to kiss her. I put my hands on her shoulders, silently, and pressed my lips against hers. My kiss was passionate and selfish, my eyes were shut, and I did not realize until she pulled her head away that she did not want to kiss me. I released her, but a taste, like poison, had crept into my mouth.
"Ruth!"
"Leave me alone," she said.
I swallowed it, this fleck of vomit, and it fell like a seed, spreading roots deep inside me, blooming with the odor of decay.
"Honey!" called Mrs. Simon. "Ruthie! I'm going. Will someone call me a cab?"
Ruth had squeezed past me and was heading toward the room where her mother stood.
Mrs. Simon embraced her and Ruth melted briefly in her mother's arms.
"I love you, baby."
"I love you, too, Mommy."
"Take care of yourself."
"You take care of yourself."
"Oh, don't worry about me," said Mrs. Simon, detaching herself. "You've got a good thing here," she added, nodding in my direction.
"I know I do," said Ruth. "Joseph, since you are such a good thing, will you go downstairs and get my mother into a cab? I'm exhausted. I'm getting right into bed."
"Are you eating?" asked Mrs. Simon, reproachfully.
"Mother!" said Ruth. "You just saw me eat. Do you want me to have my stomach pumped so you can examine the contents?"
"Ruthie, the way you talk," said Mrs. Simon, embracing her daughter again hastily, kissing her on the forehead and looking her over pityingly, a little fearfully.
"Joseph, stay here with her — she needs you more than me. I've been hailing cabs all by myself for years — besides," she said, laughing, "these days it's my only exercise."
But I already had my sneakers on and I felt the need for a little air myself. Ruth's kiss was sinking through me, spreading concentric circles of fear. Ruth hugged her mother once more, avoiding my eyes as she shut the door behind us.
Sunday nights are dead even in Manhattan and as we stood on bleak, deserted West End Avenue I was glad I had not let Mrs. Simon go down alone. The cabs were dammed up at a red light two blocks above us and Mrs. Simon stood staring at the empty street. Suddenly, she turned and faced me.
"Ruth told me about your sister," she said.
I winced. I had not wanted Ruth to tell anyone, least of all her mother. It changed how people looked at you. It gave you an unearned aura — it inched you a little out of this world. People pitied you and at the same time suspected you of something. I always felt a suspicious shadow fall on me when people asked me about Evelyn.
Mrs. Simon, however, was all sympathy. "Your poor parents," she said, putting her hand on my head with surprising gentleness, as if to soothe a bruise. "Parents never recover from something like that. How long ago was it?"
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Eve's Apple"
by .
Copyright © 1997 Jonathan Rosen.
Excerpted by permission of Picador.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Interviews
On Monday, May 18th, barnesandnoble.com welcomed Jonathan Rosen, author of EVE'S APPLE.
Ellen Wood from Portland, Maine: I read EVE'S APPLE and loved it. When I was reading it, I noted that the author was male and really marveled at your ability to describe a woman's desires and inner spirit. I am interested in how you came to write a novel about a woman's problem -- an eating disorder. What prompted you to write about this particular subject?
Jonathan Rosen: Thank you, first of all, for liking my book. Writing about a sick woman -- and making her believable -- was a challenge. I suppose I became interested in the subject of women's eating disorders in college, where I knew a great many women who seemed to have so much going for them and yet who suffered terribly over food. From the human perspective, it was painful and moving and mystifying. Novelistically, it was a great challenge because the male narrator in my book, in trying to understand his ailing girlfriend, tries to unravel the mystery not merely of her sickness but of her otherness, perhaps her femaleness -- an impossible job, of course. And I didn't want to reduce the woman to a mere object of study.
Berry Marshall from Williamsburg, Virginia: I loved your book and have recommended it to my book club. I found the themes of this book extremely compelling. My question is this: Both Ruth and Joseph are starved for things -- Ruth for food and acceptance, and Joseph for the key to unraveling Ruth's disorder. What other types of hunger did you intend these characters to represent?
Jonathan Rosen: I'm so glad you were attuned to Joseph's hunger as well as Ruth's -- that was an important element of the book for me. I think, in addition to the hunger for food and the hunger for knowledge, was the hunger for love. That is the hunger that in a sense binds these two characters together. I was also interested in juxtaposing the appetites of the immigrant students Joseph teaches -- basic hungers for food and work and apartments -- and the more complicated appetites of people like Ruth and Joseph, whose families have "made it" but who are hungry for the things people often give up when they make it in America -- embracing families, attachment to tradition, to a sense of community and home.
Joseph Peters from St. Louis, Missouri: Joseph is a very appealing character -- a man completely devoted to his girlfriend and her well-being. Do you have any special affinity for the narrator? What commonalities do you share?
Jonathan Rosen: I'm glad you like Joseph. I like him too. When I was younger, I shared a certain sense of living in limbo that I think he has, when you're an adult on paper but still not quite settled in the world. I think I also know what it means to pour your energy into loving someone and to want to save someone from the sorrow of the world. But I feel I'm different from Joseph in many ways -- and I think I feel that although he certainly loves Ruth, he needs her illness, needs to care for her. I think he needs to be educated in human relationships -- though I hope in the course of the novel he does learn a thing or two.
Monica from St. Albans: What type of research did you need to do to write a novel about eating disorders? Did you go to the library as often as your character Joseph did?
Jonathan Rosen: I did a great deal of reading for the novel -- the trick, of course, was to integrate it into the book without burdening the novel with research. Like my narrator, Joseph, I went to the library -- not quite as obsessively as he did (though writing a book can be quite obsessive) but a fair amount. I read everything I could find about the troubled relationship of people and food -- from Greek myths to lives of self-starving medieval saints who wanted to be closer to God to stories about Victorian women who became newspaper celebrities because of their ability to fast. I also read contemporary scientific studies and heartbreaking interviews with anorexics. But I was partly writing about the failure of research as well as what you learn from it, so I wasn't too afraid of leaving something out. I knew I would.
Elise from Brooklyn, New York: There is a rather sad, dark underside to this book. At the end of EVE'S APPLE, Joseph is talking on the phone to Dr. Ranji, Ruth's doctor at the hospital, and he asks how people can get so bad (i.e. how Ruth could have nearly starved herself without anyone doing anything). The doctor replies, "When society itself is ill, noticing illness in others isn't easy -- sometimes it doesn't happen until too late." Mr. Rosen, can you explain this further?
Jonathan Rosen: I think that what the doctor means is that what our society values are often things that make us sick. The notion that to be thin is to be attractive is of course the most obvious and the most relevant for the book. As a society we value money and there is nothing wrong with money, but someone who works all the time and ignores his family and friends, his inner life so that he can work, may appear an outwardly prosperous man but he is inwardly ailing. Women struggling with food often appear to have everything: They please others, they are beautiful and smart, and yet they are inwardly ailing. It's too simple to blame society, but certainly our culture prizes things that do make people sick.
Megan H. from New York City: What is the significance of the two quotes -- by Milton and Kafka -- that you include before chapter one?
Jonathan Rosen: The quote from Milton is from the first line of PARADISE LOST. Milton is saying that the whole story he has to tell -- essentially the story of why we are the way we are -- is because of "the fruit of that forbidden tree." I don't accept the notion of original sin, but I think we tell ourselves that story because there is something primal in our hunger for knowledge and in our sense of ourselves as being sinful beings, burdened by the flesh. I wanted an echo of that earlier story in my reader's ear. The Kafka quote is from a story I love called "A Hunger Artist." In it, a man fasts and fasts and fasts and is displayed in a circus. But when he tells the circus overseer that he always wanted to be admired for fasting and the man says, "We do admire your fasting," the hunger artist says, "But you shouldn't admire it..." That little exchange fits my novel well -- Ruth wants to be admired for her fasting but in the end wants to be saved from it. In my mind, Jewish Kafka answers Protestant Milton. Kafka says: It's bad to afflict the flesh, to reject the body. For me the two quotes work together. They both reflect moods I know.
Daniel M. from San Francisco, California: Your character Joseph was obsessively drawn to fixing Ruth. I knew as I was reading that something else must be behind this total absorption -- even beyond his tortuous memories of his sister's suicide. Why was Joseph so fascinated by illness?
Jonathan Rosen: I think, as you correctly observe, Joseph's own buried, sad, secret history leads him towards Ruth, even if he doesn't understand it at the time. But I think there's something fascinating -- as well as repellent -- about illness. And something instructive. Freud, after all, derived his theories about well people by studying sick people -- it was the obsessives, the hysterics, the psychotics that taught him what he considered to be the fundamentals of human behavior. But I also think we live in a culture that outwardly professes a deep devotion to health and fitness but that is secretly obsessed with the sick, the troubled, the tortured, the abused. I wonder if this isn't a leftover sense people have of the secretly sinful nature of being human. Whatever the reason, it's in the air and Joseph's absorbed it.
Renee from Charleston: I read that you are a journalist. How do you think this affects your approach to writing fiction? Did you feel fiction allowed you to say different things that an essay couldn't?
Jonathan Rosen: I absolutely think fiction lets you say different things, and I can't imagine the nonfiction version of this story. One thing you feel when you're a journalist is the need for facts and information. Joseph feels that hunger for knowledge too -- he goes to the library to read about eating disorders because his girlfriend has one and gets so carried away he actually looks her name up on the library computer. But the education of the human heart is impossible to show in an article. And in a novel, one can do several things at once -- I could share the information Joseph learns about women and food even as I'm partly illustrating the failure of mere information. And I could express the part of myself that is like Joseph -- the part that wishes to heal and help and nourish, even as I indulged some other darker side that could imagine Ruth, eating each tiny crumb with scrupulous care, wishing to throw off the burden of the body and be free.
Emily Stewart from Washington, D.C.: I haven't read EVE'S APPLE but I have heard a lot of good things about it and plan on buying it soon. Can you tell us in your own words what it is about?
Jonathan Rosen: I suppose I'd say it's a novel about a man who loves a woman who is sick and who tries to heal her, embarking on a kind of journey to unravel the mystery of her illness -- only to discover in the process that he -- like all of us -- has his own demons. But I should immediately say that summarizing a book is painful, because it's giving in to a sort of anorexic impulse to strip away the body of the book and replace it with some airy essence. It's tempting because novels are so messy, but I hope the book lives in its messiness.
Jonathan Rosen: I'd like to thank you for the chance to do this. The immediacy of being online, which I've never experienced before, is exhilarating. Also, I'd like to thank the participants -- the questions were terrific and I feel people read my book with real depth and openness. Partly because of the online experience, and certainly because of the people out there, I've never felt so connected to readers before (and all while sitting at my desk). Thank you!