Eve's Apple Book

For his first novel, author Jonathan Rosen has chosen a difficult subject: eating disorders. That he chooses to tell his story from the perspective of a young man in love with an anorexic woman makes Eve's Apple unusual, placing the focus not on the disorder itself but on the characters' reactions to it. The narrator, Joseph, fell in love with Ruth while both were still college students; on their first date Ruth told him about her battle with anorexia and her apparent triumph over it. Several months later they are living together in New York, where Joseph teaches English to Russian immigrants and Ruth is in therapy. For Joseph, Ruth's openness with him about her illness is both a symbol of her trust and an admission of her need for him. In fact, it soon becomes clear that her anorexia is part of what makes her attractive to him. Still, it comes as a shock when he discovers by surreptitiously reading her diary that Ruth has been keeping a side of herself secret, even from him. Eve's Apple is an ambitious book, a meditation on love, on trust and on hunger, both physical and emotional. At times Rosen's prose gets a little overheated, and his characters begin to declaim as if they were heroes in an epic poem: "Perhaps you should think of Ruth as another immigrant," one character advises Joseph. "The world expects her to speak the artificial language of modern life, but the language of the body is her secret tongue. The language of food. The primitive language that truly shapes us and that we can never escape. That is the language you will have to learn if you are going to understand her." And so on for half a page. Do people really talk that way in New York these days? When Rosen cools off, however, he can be quite affecting; some of the best scenes in the book take place in Joseph's classroom and with his fellow teachers.Read More