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Book Review: More Than It Hurts You by Darin Strauss
Snarknote Please read my re-review of this book.
Josh Goldin has a comfortable suburban Long Island life. He has a beautiful, devoted wife, Dori, and an adorable newborn son, Zack. He works as an ad salesman for a cable TV network, a job that fits perfectly with his laid-back, “everyman” personality. He earns a decent living, owns a nice home, enjoys new fatherhood, loves his wife, and has a good marriage. So what if he and Dori don’t talk much anymore; that’s to be expected when a new baby arrives on the scene. Right? Right?
Dori Goldin is a former phlebotomist who happily left her career to be a full-time mom. Her life revolves around her son, and she’d have it no other way. Even with baby spit-up on her nightshirt, she’s still a beautiful woman, vibrant, intelligent, and committed to her family. So what if, every once in a while, she has to intentionally inflict serious pain on her son in order to bring the family closer together. Right? Right?
Dr. Darlene Stokes is a brilliant physician, Head of Pediatrics at Josh and Dori’s local hospital. Darlene is African-American, a single mother, and has worked with fierce determination and skill to attain the multitude of achievements she’s amassed in her life. One afternoon, Dori Goldin rushes her son to Darlene’s ER with an inexplicable illness: an illness that posits more than a few serious question marks in Dr. Stokes’s head. When she suspects Dori might have had something to do with Zack’s illness, she’s just making the obvious observations and taking the necessary precautions. Right? Right?
In More Than It Hurts You, Darin Strauss, the author of Cheng & Eng and The Real McCoy, tackles the challenging, fascinating terrain of Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome (a disorder in which a parent, usually a mother, purposely injures her own child in order to get attention for herself) and its devastating effects. The story is also charged with a panacea of other potentially explosive elements: racism, antisemitism, class divisions, the healthcare industry, the criminal justice system, the slow, agonizing death of American culture. This is a brave, ambitious novel that succeeds nicely on several levels, but falls flat on many others.
Strauss has a terrific gift with prose. Whether burrowing into the innermost thoughts of his characters, or making an airy pop culture reference, he is equally effective. His words are finely-chosen little sparks of electricity that paint a devastating portrait of a family in crises and a doctor in turmoil. Strauss’s impressive prowess with language is what eventually makes this novel as entertaining and readable as it is.
The story, though complex and mesmerizing, doesn’t quite match its author’s talent. More Than It Hurts You frequently veers off-course onto some truly baffling and distracting tangents, and when it does get back in line (which it commendably does), it’s very difficult not to feel a bit jarred. There are a few elongated sequences that, while filling out the “behind the scenes” lives of the characters, prove pretty pointless. Darlene out on a date, in which she waxes philosophical about the current state of music in an overlong indictment of the music industry and music criticism. Darlene’s father, whom she’s never met, just released from prison and unexpectedly becoming a hero during a botched robbery. Josh and Dori’s smarmy lawyer going about his day. All of these plot points are tremendously discursive, and even a little maddening, since the story at the root of More Than It Hurts You is so damn interesting.
Strauss goes to great lengths in painting the detailed inner lives and histories of Josh and Darlene. One feels, at the end of this book, that these two characters are completely human, knowable, and accessible. We learn the stories of their lives, the emotions and fears and mistakes and triumphs that drive them. Both of these characters, for very different sets of reasons, are enthralling.
Unfortunately, this rich characterization does not extend to the book’s central figure, Dori. While we learn intimately the thoughts, ideas, and biographies of Josh and Darlene, we learn virtually nothing of Dori. Though we do come to understand that, in her own messed-up logic, she’s bleeding her son in order to bring her family closer together, we don’t get any inkling of what has led such a bright, sensible woman to this point. There is almost no discussion of her history, what has shaped her and damaged her to result in such a tragically flawed state of logic. And of the three key players in this story, Dori is really the one we should come to know best: she is the catalyst for everything that happens in these pages.
Luckily, we have Strauss’s solid words to carry us through. More Than It Hurts You is definitely readable and often entertaining, but in the end, it doesn’t offer much insight into the illness it’s so harrowingly attempting to examine. If only the story could hold up under the weight of the author’s prodigious talent.
Despite its frequent meanderings, the book does possess some memorable scenes of great emotion and originality. One that plays over in my mind is the passage with Josh, at his company’s lavish annual sales presentation, interspersed with scenes of Dori at home with Zack, strapping him to a board and bleeding him with a needle. This vignetted interplay of such diverse emotion is hugely upsetting and stunningly original.
If only the entire book were as successful. Grade: C+ Revised Grade: B+
Book Title More Than It Hurts You
Author Darin Strauss
Publisher Dutton
Year Published 2008
ISBN 0525950702
Snarkbytes Here’s a funny, drunken Darin Strauss being interviewed on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson.
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7 Responses to “Book Review: More Than It Hurts You by Darin Strauss”
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Сейчас попробуем. Это здесь, если я не ошибаюсь.
Очень приятно, что остались ещё такие как вы!
Попробуем так, спасибо!
Для общего развития посмотреть мона, а так могли бы и лучьше,
Интересный момент, двояко понимается как то.
Давно искал, чтобы подробно было расписано.
Привет! я лично рад, что хоть у кого-то получается добиться успеха!
Идея в общем понятна, раньше не предавал ей значение. Поздравляю!