Love Invents Us

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Summary: Love Invents us Blooms with Love
Review: Amy Bloom creates another wonderful world of a teenage girl growing up in New Jersey, and the men and people that love her. A beautiful read

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Summary: Sometimes Bumpy for the Heroine and the Reader
Review: Amy Bloom's Love Invents Us can sometimes be a very beautiful book with a challenging character at its centre and it can sometimes be a very frustrating book with a challenging charater at its centre. Ultimately, it is a satisfying read but the journey is not always pleasant as Elizabeth grows up and grows older. The male characters are not always drawn as finely but it is, of course, not their story but Elizabeth's. The need for love creates and sustains this story and gives the novel its razor sharp painfulness. I wished I enjoyed the character of Elizabeth more as then it would be her personality that took me through this novel instead of being propelled by the wonderful prose of Amy Bloom over the slow spots. In the end, a good book if not always a pleasure.

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Summary: Fascinating Characters, Elegant Prose
Review: Amy Bloom's stunning writing made what might have been a depressing story a terrific read. I found her characters not only believable, but sympathetic and fraught with the complicated baggage that makes real people interesting--and at times intolerable, as these characters were.

Elizabeth Taube's quest for love begins with the strange fur salesman Mr. Klein and continues through a series of longer-lasting relationships, none of which completely satisfies her--although all of them do, as the title says, invent her. From Mrs. Hill, who teaches her how love through service, to Mr. Stone, her obsessed English teacher, to her parents' disconnected affection, Elizabeth learns about love in the complex forms in which it presents itself to us, and Amy Bloom shows us how Elizabeth learns in elegant prose.

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Summary: Doesn't hold together
Review: Bloom is another example of a reasonably talented writer who blows it in terms of style and character motivation. LOVE INVENTS US is about the life of a woman and the men who love her throughout that life. And while the story flows effortlessly at many points, at others -- especially when sex is being described -- the language becomes self-conscious and overly flowery, trying a bit too hard to be stylistic.

I could tolerate that if I found the characters a bit more likeable. But I could never get a handle on them. I didn't believe that they really loved one another, not for so long, not throughout so much separation. I might have accepted that for the central couple, the high school sweethearts in an interracial relationship separated by an intolerant father. But I couldn't believe that the junior high school teacher would fall for his young student and maintain that love until she becomes an adult and nurses him during his terminal illness, seemingly motivated to do so by her own asexual love for him.

That's where the story fell apart for me. What were these people doing? When were they going to change? By the end, I didn't particularly care.

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Summary: Will trigger your depression
Review: I had only read the occasional magazine article by Amy Bloom, and i liked her style. However, this novel is a complete disappointment. For one, there is nothing lovable in Elizabeth as a character. She is a sad and selfish person who does absolutely nothing to redeem herself. In fact, she acknowledges at the end how she is 'dangerous' to her own son. Elizabeth has drifted through life being no good, knowing it, doing nothing about it, and taking advantage of whoever dropped by her side, like a leech. Maybe it all started because her parents were very indifferent to her, maybe because she felt abused by the variety of pedophiles that crossed her path. Why the revelations about her mother's past? Did that explain anything about her behavior? I was repulsed by Max, because he is unwilling to justify his fatal attraction for Elizabeth ('whatever is, is'), and (to Amy Bloom's credit) also because of his gruesome physique. I did not understand how Huddie's uncle would "root" for his nephew and then intercept the love letters he was sending Elizabeth. The relationship between Huddie's parents was never made clear. Also, there were too many people narrating the story. The ending is a sheer cliff. What kind of resolution was achieved? The part i enjoyed the most was when Elizabeth took care of Mrs. Hill, and the relationship between the two. Amy Bloom does a very good job describing physicality and the erotic nuances of melons (make sure you always wash your fruit after purchase. Who knows what your grocer had been licking). Other than that, this novel is a humongous disappointment.

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Summary: Poetic justice
Review: It is rare that an book's plot can be obscured by its writing. Love Invents Us is rare indeed. Perfectely capturing every detail, every last moment in prose stunning enough to make you return to read it twice, Amy Bloom will not dissapoint.

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Summary: My FIRST by Amy Bloom
Review: The title of this book should be "Sex Invents Us", since Amy Bloom has fallen into the trap of many modern authors, focusing almost solely on the sexual experiences of her characters in telling their life stories. Are all the defining moments in Elizbeth's troubled childhood sexual?

What about the social ostracism she experienced, and the effects of cold, distant parents? Only the sexual abuse is spelled out in excruciating detail. Why did an adult man fall for Elizabeth? What was Max thinking? In Lolita, the reader was privy to Humbert's deluded rationalization of sexula desire for a child. In this book, the reader is never given a glimpse of how Max justified his actions to himself. I repeatedly found myself asking the question - why?

The reader also knows that Huddie and Elizabeth had great sex together from the start. Is that what makes them life-long soulmates? How did these characters relate as people outside the sexual arena. Once again, I was left wondering why the connection between these characters is so strong.

OK. So I had some problems with the storyline and how it unfolded. I still consider Bloom's writing to be powerful and very breathtaking. Definitely worth trying her other books.

I will read more of Amy Bloom to see how she shapes up.





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Summary: Incredibly depressing, beautifully written
Review: The title of this book, Love Invents Us, leads you to believe you will be reading a passionate love story, one with obstacles to overcome and triumphs to behold. What I read was pure drivel! I had no sympathy for Elizabeth, who never stepped out of the cycle, who loved the unloveable and continued to exercise meaningless, false relationships throughout her life. Elizabeth was very unhealthy and used, and I had no room to find goodness or sincerity in her. I could barely make it to the end of the 205 pages. Although there were some allusions to the human body that were very well written, there weren't enough of them to redeem this book for me. I'm sorry, but this book belongs in Bad Book Hell.

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Summary: Nourishment
Review: While reading "Love Invents Us" and about Elizabeth, I was reminded of several recent movie characters who find themselves in similar situations: Enid in "Ghost Story" and "J" in "My First Mister." Besides all three characters being about the same age, all three also have affairs of a sort with older men, all are rebels, all dress in a style best described as Goth and all three are devastatingly intelligent and colossally misunderstood ("My Mother usually acted as though I had been raised by a responsible, affectionate governess: guilt and love were as foreign to her as butter and sugar."). More importantly all have a deep capacity for love, untapped as it mostly is.
Elizabeth Taube, though she complains of not being, is well loved: by Max, a high school teacher who falls compulsively and helplessly for her: "So beautiful, Max thought. Am I supposed to be ashamed for being such a dirty old man, another Humbert, disgusting in my obsession?" By Mrs. Hill a nearly blind elderly woman whom she helps out several times a week and who "sees" Max's attraction to Elizabeth: "You put one hand on that child who thinks you love her fine mind...and I'll see you turning in Hell, listen to you pray for death." and by Huddie a young African American who once his father finds out about the affair, sends Huddie away: "(Huddie was)...a hundred times handsomer than the other handsome boys, kinder than the other sports stars. Even girls he slept with only once had nothing bad to say about him."
All of the characters in "Love Invents Us" have to deal with missed chances and miss-connections. Max's wife Greta says: "I did think it would be a happy life. That is what people think. That's why they marry and have children. In anticipation of further joy, of multiplying happiness." To which Max replies: "People like me marry and have children because we are apparently not dead, because we are grateful. Because we wish to become like the others. To experience normal despair and disappointment."
Amy Bloom's writing is voluptuous, fat and juicy as befits a novel about the many faces of Love and what we as humans are willing to do to bite off some of it for ourselves. If Love Invents Us, it also feeds us, nourishes us and substantiates our existence.