Talking in Bed

This book made me question whether a person can be both an intellectual, who is not guided by instinct and a person who can feel unconditional love for another human being. I think that the two personalities are exclusive and that each contributes its abilities to the world.

Antonya Nelson's Talking in Bed is a wonderful book. I became enraptured by the three main characters and fell head long into their lives. The triangle they form changes all their lives forever and even the resolution is equal parts both satisfying and disturbing because these three people will never be the same. That is both good and bad as it is the world outside of fiction. I give the author many points for making me care so much about these people (and even the main couple's children are given marvelous, small places to shine). The book is smart and very touching without becoming sentimental. There are no epiphanies only small decisions and deceits that reverberate. A wonderful read.

Thoroughly enjoyable relationship story. The line that stuck with me (I quote from memory so excuse any deviation) is: "people are like artichokes, it takes alot of work to get to the heart"...

I was captured in the small world of this story from the very first few pages, and went through the end with a smooth and pleasurable reading. Antonya's language is flowing, light and modern but never simplified, instead interestingly densified, sometimes, when she represents the inner thoughts of one of her characters. The way Antonya portraits the "personae" is one of a progressive build-up, non-descriptive but rather allusive. We learn in bits, from one chapter to the next, about the mental attitudes and physical complexion of each character. I appreciated the mindful, sensitive way the body flaws of the middle age are brought about for the characters of Evan and Rachel, in contrast with the younger Paddy's fitness. If represented by a European writer, I imagine Evan's character would have been an introvert intellectual, quite probably a tardo-existentialist marxist (I am thinking to some figures in Alberto Moravia's novels), maybe with feminist concerns. Being American, instead, Antonya endows Evan of a left-wing mind-shape, ecologist and nature-maniac personality, which translates into a number of little daily obsessions. Oh, and of course he's a shrink. Still, after reading the entire novel, I cannot realize if Evan is a stubborn selfish from birth or rather a troubled person on the verge of a mid-life crisis. Although the first half of the novel is very equilibrated, none of the three main characters emerging as a protagonist, progressively the focus tightens on Rachel, Ev's wife. In the second half of the story, she is the real "agens" which spins the plot despite the individual moves of her two maybe-lovers Evan and Paddy. Antonya portraits Rachel as an earth-toned woman, with large physical traits engrossed by the incoming age. Her attempts to get in shape and to make-up (maybe for a slightly naive insistence by the author) are pitiful, and revealing of her fear of the time. Nevertheless, Rachel shines as a magnetically attractive and sexual woman for the reader, her helplessness being deeply moving (the scene when, just abandoned by Evan, she waters the garden of her girl-friend, "weeping all the day on [her] grass" is a cameo). Just because I loved Rachel's character so much, I am noting here a minor failure of the story which happens somewhere in the final chapters. When Rachel finds herself in full control of the situation with both Paddy (who wants to leave his wife) and Evan (who wants to come back home), she takes care of the two in a rather too "motherly" way (if she were a man I would say she is being paternalistic). I found this sudden explosion of wisdom and judgement unnecessary to the drama (Rachel says to herself something like "women must always take care of it all"), whilst, up to that moment, Rachel had been crying for her life, bouncing from one pier to another like an unsteered boat in the wind. Otherwise, the novel is a beautifully narrated story about three, and a few more, lives for which the