Appearances

Joanne Greenberg takes on a most forbidden subject here - the humanity of a pedophile. I don't want to spoil the plot of the novel, but suffice to say she sheds light from several angles on a man who did terrible things in his past - and she gracefully separates the essence of the man from the things that he did. She looks at him as a person with a problem, not with an evil self... This alone makes this book valuable and important. Add to this that the book is fast-flowing, gripping, and consistently heartfelt... (It's also the story of a family coming to grips with their 20-something year old daughter's impending blindness, not to mention the emotional blindness of the girl's mother about the blindness and the pedophilia in the family.) However, Greenberg does not really explore why the pedophile did what he did, and just accepts his lack of insight as enough, which to me is sad. (Not that any pedophiles I have met - I'm a therapist - have had much more insight into themselves. But still...) Here I love the writing of psychologist Alice Miller, who delves further beneath the surface to help understand why a man like this might do what he did... However, even Alice Miller has her limits when it comes to relating to pedophiles. (To me it's clear-cut: pedophilia is an acted out replication, coded, metaphorical, or literal, for those things done to the pedophile when he was a child.) Not an easy subject, and if one of the best psychology writers out there falls short, then all the more kudos to Joanne Greenberg, who succeeds at creating a real flesh-and-blood human out of her fictional character. One last point: I couldn't help but think throughout the book that the mother, who from the first mention of the pedophilia to the end of the book had no empathy for the pedophile and just considered him evil evil evil, was herself molested as a kid. (Greenberg never explored this possibility.) It sure would have added up - and would have helped me empathize more with her closed-mindedness!

This book really hit me hard emotionally. I read it during my morning commute and there were a few times when I was on the verge of getting teary for my sympathy to the story's father-son relationship. And most importantly, I appreciated how this book does not end cornily.

Joanne Greenberg is a master of the human condition--but never slaps you upside the head with abject sentimentality. Moving moments sneak up on you. You find yourself remembering what it really means to be a parent, or, for that matter, a child. Awakenings has an added bonus: evocative scenes set in the Colorado mountains, in the kind small towns that are rapidly going extinct. The book bristles with a maturity you don't have to be mature to appreciate. Enough already with I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. More people need to read the rest of Greenberg's absorbing work.

I took APPEARANCES with me on a train ride because the book I was already reading was too large to carry. I started reading and couldn't stop, and I ended up crying my eyes out. It's a very moving book about a difficult subject--a man discovers dark secrets of his father's past. We need more books like this for grownpups!