cover image The Passion of Alice

The Passion of Alice

Stephanie Grant. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH), $19.95 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-395-75518-1

The suppression (and awakening) of many different appetites and hungers is the theme of this edgy and intense first novel whose protagonist is a 25-year-old anorexic. Almost six feet tall and weighing 94 pounds, Alice Forrester is sent to the Seaview clinic in Massachusetts after suffering a heart attack. The methods used to cure her aversion to food--ranging from 12-step programs to neofeminist rationalizations--are at first powerless against Alice's stubborn need to impose her will on every situation. Meanwhile, she views herself and others with clear-sighted candor. ``Being a feminist and a Catholic... I could hold two opposing views in my head at the same time,'' she says. All of the patients at Seaview have eating disorders. Grant draws their portraits with a stiletto pen: the ageing ``Queen'' Victoria; the frail, beautiful Gwen, whose eventual fate is both horrifying and macabre; the disruptive, bulimic Maeve. Alice's brittle parents are sharply delineated, as are the counselors who confess to these girls and women that there is nothing for them to look forward to in life but controlling their appetites. And appetite has a lot to do with Alice's attraction to Maeve. Smoking, puking in her purse and having sex in the bathrooms, Maeve is like Alice's heavier twin, someone who devours but never consumes. The first-person narration is expressive without being wordy, and Alice's voice--the dry wit, the outsider's observations--adds a level of credibility to this chronicle of young women who are female versions of Kafka's hunger artist: they're anorexic because they haven't yet tasted a food they like. The story of how Alice finds that food and renounces her feeling of emptiness is convincing and, in the end, quite moving, proving Grant a writer in cool command of her talent. (Oct.)