Love Invents Us

My latest random book read was Amy Bloom's Love Invents Us (1998). This one is one of Josh's books, and I had remembered in the back of my mind that he was kind of ambivalent about it. After reading the novel, I've got to say that I'm pretty ambivalent about it too.

The plot (for those of you who don't want to read the book): The novel follows the life of Elizabeth from elementary school through adulthood. She grows up on the East Coast with distant, wealthy parents. She is an outcast at school when she is young, takes care of an elderly woman three days a week, and has an ongoing love affair with one of her teachers from the time she is 14 until she is in high school (sometimes mental, sometimes physical). The affair stops when she begins seeing a hot young high school boy who she loves madly and who accidentally gets her pregnant. After she has an abortion and the boy's father finds out about her, he is sent away to live with relatives in the South. They don't see each other again until eight years later when Elizabeth comes back home to take care of the teacher whose heart she broke after he has major heart surgery. Boy is married but apparently the brief high school fling was so great that they can't keep apart from each other, so they have an affair. Teacher dies, boy decides to end affair. Fast forward another 15 years and Elizabeth is a single mother, boy finds her again, and they rekindle their relationship -- or do they?

The thing is, it sounds like a lot of things are happening in this book. And they are. But the characters are so lifeless and lame that one really doesn't care if they get together, split up, have sex, die, or seduce children. The whole thing is very unsatisfying, and the change of tense through the different parts of the book comes off as pretentious and distancing.

I give this book one giant "meh," two "blahs," and a "bleh."

I do kind of want to read her short story collection, though. Many of the problems with this novel seem like they could be resolved in short story form.