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By Blood
The award-winning writer returns with a major, absorbing, atmospheric novel that takes on the most dramatic and profoundly personal subject matter.
San Francisco in the 1970s. Free love has given way to radical feminism, psychedelic ecstasy to hard-edged gloom. The Zodiac Killer stalks the streets. A disgraced professor takes an office in a downtown tower to plot his return. But the walls are thin and he's distracted by voices from next door—his neighbor is a psychologist, and one of her patients dislikes the hum of the white-noise machine. And so he begins to hear about the patient's troubles with her female lover, her conflicts with her adoptive, avowedly WASP family, and her quest to track down her birth mother. The professor is not just absorbed but enraptured. And the further he is pulled into the patient's recounting of her dramas—and the most profound questions of her own identity—the more he needs the story to move forward.
The patient's questions about her birth family have led her to a Catholic charity that trafficked freshly baptized orphans out of Germany after World War II. But confronted with this new self— “I have no idea what it means to say ‘I’m a Jew’”—the patient finds her search stalled. Armed with the few details he’s gleaned, the professor takes up the quest and quickly finds the patient’s mother in records from a German displaced-persons camp. But he can’t let on that he’s been eavesdropping, so he mocks up a reply from an adoption agency the patient has contacted and drops it in the mail. Through the wall, he hears how his dear patient is energized by the news, and so is he. He unearths more clues and invests more and more in this secret, fraught, triangular relationship: himself, the patient, and her therapist, who is herself German. His research leads them deep into the history of displaced-persons camps, of postwar Zionism, and—most troubling of all—of the Nazi Lebensborn program. With ferocious intelligence and an enthralling, magnetic prose, Ellen Ullman weaves a dark and brilliant, intensely personal novel that feels as big and timeless as it is sharp and timely. It is an ambitious work that establishes her as a major writer.
San Francisco in the 1970s. Free love has given way to radical feminism, psychedelic ecstasy to hard-edged gloom. The Zodiac Killer stalks the streets. A disgraced professor takes an office in a downtown tower to plot his return. But the walls are thin and he's distracted by voices from next door—his neighbor is a psychologist, and one of her patients dislikes the hum of the white-noise machine. And so he begins to hear about the patient's troubles with her female lover, her conflicts with her adoptive, avowedly WASP family, and her quest to track down her birth mother. The professor is not just absorbed but enraptured. And the further he is pulled into the patient's recounting of her dramas—and the most profound questions of her own identity—the more he needs the story to move forward.
The patient's questions about her birth family have led her to a Catholic charity that trafficked freshly baptized orphans out of Germany after World War II. But confronted with this new self— “I have no idea what it means to say ‘I’m a Jew’”—the patient finds her search stalled. Armed with the few details he’s gleaned, the professor takes up the quest and quickly finds the patient’s mother in records from a German displaced-persons camp. But he can’t let on that he’s been eavesdropping, so he mocks up a reply from an adoption agency the patient has contacted and drops it in the mail. Through the wall, he hears how his dear patient is energized by the news, and so is he. He unearths more clues and invests more and more in this secret, fraught, triangular relationship: himself, the patient, and her therapist, who is herself German. His research leads them deep into the history of displaced-persons camps, of postwar Zionism, and—most troubling of all—of the Nazi Lebensborn program. With ferocious intelligence and an enthralling, magnetic prose, Ellen Ullman weaves a dark and brilliant, intensely personal novel that feels as big and timeless as it is sharp and timely. It is an ambitious work that establishes her as a major writer.
378 pages, Hardcover
First published February 24, 2012
78 people are currently reading
5030 people want to read
About the author
Ellen Ullman
17 books185 followersEllen Ullman is the author of By Blood, The Bug, a New York Times Notable Book and runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the cult classic memoir Close to the Machine, based on her years as a rare female computer programmer in the early years of the personal computer era. She lives in San Francisco.
http://us.macmillan.com/author/ellenu...
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 448 reviews
December 17, 2015
3.5/5
Please don't judge your reception of this book by my rating. It is a product of the dashing of too many expectations, trends of hope that either concluded too soon or fizzled out after too long a run, and a particular pet peeve. Despite all that, I am keen on seeing more from Ullman, as it is clear from this work that she is not a mediocre writer fulfilling the mediocre, but an author of great potential operating through some caveats.
First off, my loves: the care with which Ullman set up the narrator, the theme of bloodborne identity as an enigma of cancer or cure, and most of all, the setting of San Francisco and the wider Bay Area. The latter is not nearly as auspicious or intellectual in the context of literature as the previous, but San Francisco was my first urban excitement, my initial venture on my own from the suburbs to the city within the easy confines of the rapid transit system, a chill diaphanous of concrete bones and ocean soul and nary a trace of the landlocked childhood where the lights of the Golden Gate could be seen on the clearest days from the roof of my house. It is also my claim to a career suffused with literature, supported by both historical past and my own experiences at both bookstores and internship, so forgive me my bias; it is not often that my current trend of reading skips over the East Coast Usual to settle in the more local hues of the Pacific, and much to my pleasure, Ullman did indeed deliver.
As mentioned before all the cityscape rhapsodizing, I also enjoyed the more philosophical bents of how much is one determined by the two halves of a recombinant DNA, nature expressed on the pages at its finest purity if not its most beloved state. However, I feel Ullman held back on the more crazed aspects of such an endless itching at the self, choosing to illustrate the confusion with more the mundane events of taking the wrong train to more sexually liberated realms (SF, after all), creeping on another's therapy session, pinning hopes of survival on one's existence as a fly on the wall in the house of sins of the mother. The added dashes of Zodiac Killer vacuoles and Patty Hearst turnarounds were more sensationalist structurings around the chosen period than anything else, and could've been easily replaced by more disturbing narrative breaks in the first person spiel for reader destabilization purposes.
Finally, the aforementioned pet peeve that sunk my rating down was the author's succumbing to sentiment of the worst degree. I was thrilled when Ullman gracefully used lesbianism as a trait without relying on it as a linchpin, and didn't even mind the whole trial of parent-child disconnect, overused but here revitalized in a engaging enough matter. However, this avoidance of stereotypes did not extend to the cloying thematic overload of Germans, WWII, and the Jewish people. I cannot stand this crutch of a pathos ever since reading Kertész' Fatelessness, and by the last invocation of awe stricken horror that is all too often abused for audience catharsis of the Pavlov sort, I was through.
As said, the previous is a personal aggravation, and if this sort of thing doesn't bother you, go for it. I myself am still interested in Ullman's other works, as it's not often I run into a contemporary author who still has time to flourish. My hopes are only that she finds her way to some Jelinek in the future; should Ullman do so, whether she loves her or hates her, I believe the effect would be a delicious one.
Please don't judge your reception of this book by my rating. It is a product of the dashing of too many expectations, trends of hope that either concluded too soon or fizzled out after too long a run, and a particular pet peeve. Despite all that, I am keen on seeing more from Ullman, as it is clear from this work that she is not a mediocre writer fulfilling the mediocre, but an author of great potential operating through some caveats.
First off, my loves: the care with which Ullman set up the narrator, the theme of bloodborne identity as an enigma of cancer or cure, and most of all, the setting of San Francisco and the wider Bay Area. The latter is not nearly as auspicious or intellectual in the context of literature as the previous, but San Francisco was my first urban excitement, my initial venture on my own from the suburbs to the city within the easy confines of the rapid transit system, a chill diaphanous of concrete bones and ocean soul and nary a trace of the landlocked childhood where the lights of the Golden Gate could be seen on the clearest days from the roof of my house. It is also my claim to a career suffused with literature, supported by both historical past and my own experiences at both bookstores and internship, so forgive me my bias; it is not often that my current trend of reading skips over the East Coast Usual to settle in the more local hues of the Pacific, and much to my pleasure, Ullman did indeed deliver.
As mentioned before all the cityscape rhapsodizing, I also enjoyed the more philosophical bents of how much is one determined by the two halves of a recombinant DNA, nature expressed on the pages at its finest purity if not its most beloved state. However, I feel Ullman held back on the more crazed aspects of such an endless itching at the self, choosing to illustrate the confusion with more the mundane events of taking the wrong train to more sexually liberated realms (SF, after all), creeping on another's therapy session, pinning hopes of survival on one's existence as a fly on the wall in the house of sins of the mother. The added dashes of Zodiac Killer vacuoles and Patty Hearst turnarounds were more sensationalist structurings around the chosen period than anything else, and could've been easily replaced by more disturbing narrative breaks in the first person spiel for reader destabilization purposes.
Finally, the aforementioned pet peeve that sunk my rating down was the author's succumbing to sentiment of the worst degree. I was thrilled when Ullman gracefully used lesbianism as a trait without relying on it as a linchpin, and didn't even mind the whole trial of parent-child disconnect, overused but here revitalized in a engaging enough matter. However, this avoidance of stereotypes did not extend to the cloying thematic overload of Germans, WWII, and the Jewish people. I cannot stand this crutch of a pathos ever since reading Kertész' Fatelessness, and by the last invocation of awe stricken horror that is all too often abused for audience catharsis of the Pavlov sort, I was through.
As said, the previous is a personal aggravation, and if this sort of thing doesn't bother you, go for it. I myself am still interested in Ullman's other works, as it's not often I run into a contemporary author who still has time to flourish. My hopes are only that she finds her way to some Jelinek in the future; should Ullman do so, whether she loves her or hates her, I believe the effect would be a delicious one.
May 19, 2016
very, very frustrated with the book as a whole. It felt like a good 150-page novella wrapped in a boring therapist plot wrapped in a bad narrator plot, all working to drag the book out as long as she could. The numerous chapter-breaks didn't help things at all, making it very easy to walk away from the book, and padding out the page-length further.
A large part of the frustration is that it felt like Ullman decided how the plot had to be punched up at certain points, and use the most transparent devices to get there. For example, at one point she decided that the book needed some time-pressure, so the manager re-appears with his request. The narrator needed to feel a certain aggressive engagement with the patient's story, so we get the therapist's background. We need to get across certain facets of the narrator, so he wanders into various parts of San Francisco, with flimsy justifications for why he's doing so.
We can certainly backfit explanations onto his behavior, as Ullman clearly did, but they feel like deviations from the flow of the novel thrown in to achieve a specific end. The novel never really cohered for me, and it felt like while the characters' all dealt with identity as a core question, those threads never really informed each other outside of the patient's immediate families.
All-in-all, this felt like what could have been a good book was buried under countless concessions to punch it up into popular fiction. Information was doled out sparingly to draw the reader along, in what must have been 5-15 minute therapy sessions judging from how much is actually discussed before the inevitable interludes. And even though I liked that central narrative that the patient actually experienced, as a whole, It's easily the book I've liked the least so far this year.
A large part of the frustration is that it felt like Ullman decided how the plot had to be punched up at certain points, and use the most transparent devices to get there. For example, at one point she decided that the book needed some time-pressure, so the manager re-appears with his request. The narrator needed to feel a certain aggressive engagement with the patient's story, so we get the therapist's background. We need to get across certain facets of the narrator, so he wanders into various parts of San Francisco, with flimsy justifications for why he's doing so.
We can certainly backfit explanations onto his behavior, as Ullman clearly did, but they feel like deviations from the flow of the novel thrown in to achieve a specific end. The novel never really cohered for me, and it felt like while the characters' all dealt with identity as a core question, those threads never really informed each other outside of the patient's immediate families.
All-in-all, this felt like what could have been a good book was buried under countless concessions to punch it up into popular fiction. Information was doled out sparingly to draw the reader along, in what must have been 5-15 minute therapy sessions judging from how much is actually discussed before the inevitable interludes. And even though I liked that central narrative that the patient actually experienced, as a whole, It's easily the book I've liked the least so far this year.
March 21, 2013
A very creepy, gothic, dark novel. The narrator reminded me of Humbert Humbert of Lolita. It's a story about a creepy man who has an office next to a Psychoanalyst. The Analyst has a patient who doesn't like the "noise machine" that is used for security purposes, so that no one can hear what is said in the office. By chance, the narrator hears one of the sessions and becomes obsessed with the patient. We learn, through his dialogue to himself, that he is a Professor of some University who is on forced leave because of some sort of impropriety with a student. But also, we learn he is very creepy and others find him creepy also. Anyway, the patient is adopted and wants to find her birth mother. The patient discovered that she was adopted from a catholic agency who took children from Nazi Germany and placed them with Catholics. The patient discovered that she could be Jewish, which she has learned from her adopted family is a bad thing. The narrator gets involved by anonymously mailing to the patient information to help her find her birth mother. I learned about some of the different "containment" camps that were involved in Germany at that time. Also, I learned of the plight of the newly freed Jews after the war ended. It's a bit of an historical fiction novel, which I liked. I felt that there was too much story given to the creepy narrator, who we don't even learn of his situation in the end. it would have been a 4 or 5 star book if there was more character definition of the narrator or if his part of the book would have been much less.
September 21, 2013
In 1970's San Francisco, a troubled Classics professor is on mandatory leave from his university position. He rents office space in a building that has period architecture accented by gargoyles and cherubs that appear more sepulchral as the professor's state of mind becomes more questionable. Although he intends to study the scholarly writings of Aeschylus, he spends his days and nights alone, ruminating on his self-worth and taking long walks through the city, recalling his long-ago suicide attempt and his forays into psychotherapy. The flimsy walls of the individual offices allow sound to penetrate, and he overhears a German-born psychiatrist and one of her female patients in the adjoining office; the doctor turns off the white-noise machine at the patient's request.
What follows is kismet, in this professor's compulsive mind. The patient is an adopted woman who feels an emptiness and sense of disconnection from the world-at-large. She believes that finding her birth parents will extricate her from the engulfing misery and dismal relationship with her adoptive parents, cold and secretive people who failed her in just about every way. The eavesdropping professor had always admired a childhood adopted best friend, Paul, for his distance and singularity from his adoptive family. The narrator thus imagines his own release from heredity, as his parents were mentally and morally weak, and his father an alcoholic.
By accommodating the stories of his best friend and the patient next door as a fundamental desire of and for identity, the professor envisions a way that he could extract himself from the clammy hand of ancestry. He envied Paul and this patient the significance of their adoptive circumstances, and over-identified with their aspirations. If Paul and the unnamed patient could free themselves from their parents, why couldn't he learn the art of being parentless, of self-creation? Absolve himself through the patient's quest.
"Born unhappy. Built in. Original, like sin...The patient and I were kin, I suddenly knew, spawn of the same cursed line: the tribe of the inherently unhappy."
The book gets off to a stellar start with its enigmatic air of mystery surrounding all the characters in this book. The professor, our narrator, eavesdrops at each session on this woman's story, which is revealed gradually by the patient as her search continues. Murky background information of a Catholic adoptive organization and a German displaced-persons camp during WW II heightens the tension. The narrator professor finds a way to intrude invisibly and "help" the patient, which raises the stakes. Meanwhile, the psychiatrist begins to feel guilty for her own ancestry, as she learns more information on the patient's background.
The asset AND the problem with this book is the structure. Initially, the narrator is beguiling, and the reader is just as eager to understand the details of the professor's story as the patient's story. Much is implicated from the start that there is psychological overlap between the professor and the adopted woman, and the short chapters alternating between the concerns of the professor and those of the patient have a Venn diagram valence to it, especially enhanced by the art cover of the book.
However, as the story progresses, the professor's relevance to the patient becomes strained and periodically forced. His own story is limited and, as the pages turn, static, so that there is a taste of filler posing as a teased unfolding. As a matter of fact, instead of receding naturally or nearing organically to the concerns of the patient, the narrator becomes an unnecessary obstruction to the story's progress, even as his mind unravels, stifling instead of alluring. His presence becomes extraneous, then spurious, but the author hamstrung him because, it seems, she didn't know what to do with his character after using him to amplify a complex tale of lineage and origin. The pace thrums at the opening, and with the events that uncover the patient's history and expose her raw emotions. However, it crawls with uneven and desultory madness when the professor continues to alternately share the spotlight.
The patient's duress is intriguing, drawing all the empathy of the reader to her biographical history and emotional state. Her ethnic identity troubles her, and is tied in with her self-esteem as a daughter. She yearns to be loved by a parent, to be known, belonged, and connected, which is at the heart of the theme. The professor's anxiety and obsessive behaviors as well as the guilt of the psychiatrist had potential, but feel unfinished and occasionally tacked on. The author, throughout, displays a talent for historical fiction, and, despite the flaws, exhibits a ripe talent for transference and counter-transference issues of psychotherapy, and identity issues that transcend blood and biology.
What follows is kismet, in this professor's compulsive mind. The patient is an adopted woman who feels an emptiness and sense of disconnection from the world-at-large. She believes that finding her birth parents will extricate her from the engulfing misery and dismal relationship with her adoptive parents, cold and secretive people who failed her in just about every way. The eavesdropping professor had always admired a childhood adopted best friend, Paul, for his distance and singularity from his adoptive family. The narrator thus imagines his own release from heredity, as his parents were mentally and morally weak, and his father an alcoholic.
By accommodating the stories of his best friend and the patient next door as a fundamental desire of and for identity, the professor envisions a way that he could extract himself from the clammy hand of ancestry. He envied Paul and this patient the significance of their adoptive circumstances, and over-identified with their aspirations. If Paul and the unnamed patient could free themselves from their parents, why couldn't he learn the art of being parentless, of self-creation? Absolve himself through the patient's quest.
"Born unhappy. Built in. Original, like sin...The patient and I were kin, I suddenly knew, spawn of the same cursed line: the tribe of the inherently unhappy."
The book gets off to a stellar start with its enigmatic air of mystery surrounding all the characters in this book. The professor, our narrator, eavesdrops at each session on this woman's story, which is revealed gradually by the patient as her search continues. Murky background information of a Catholic adoptive organization and a German displaced-persons camp during WW II heightens the tension. The narrator professor finds a way to intrude invisibly and "help" the patient, which raises the stakes. Meanwhile, the psychiatrist begins to feel guilty for her own ancestry, as she learns more information on the patient's background.
The asset AND the problem with this book is the structure. Initially, the narrator is beguiling, and the reader is just as eager to understand the details of the professor's story as the patient's story. Much is implicated from the start that there is psychological overlap between the professor and the adopted woman, and the short chapters alternating between the concerns of the professor and those of the patient have a Venn diagram valence to it, especially enhanced by the art cover of the book.
However, as the story progresses, the professor's relevance to the patient becomes strained and periodically forced. His own story is limited and, as the pages turn, static, so that there is a taste of filler posing as a teased unfolding. As a matter of fact, instead of receding naturally or nearing organically to the concerns of the patient, the narrator becomes an unnecessary obstruction to the story's progress, even as his mind unravels, stifling instead of alluring. His presence becomes extraneous, then spurious, but the author hamstrung him because, it seems, she didn't know what to do with his character after using him to amplify a complex tale of lineage and origin. The pace thrums at the opening, and with the events that uncover the patient's history and expose her raw emotions. However, it crawls with uneven and desultory madness when the professor continues to alternately share the spotlight.
The patient's duress is intriguing, drawing all the empathy of the reader to her biographical history and emotional state. Her ethnic identity troubles her, and is tied in with her self-esteem as a daughter. She yearns to be loved by a parent, to be known, belonged, and connected, which is at the heart of the theme. The professor's anxiety and obsessive behaviors as well as the guilt of the psychiatrist had potential, but feel unfinished and occasionally tacked on. The author, throughout, displays a talent for historical fiction, and, despite the flaws, exhibits a ripe talent for transference and counter-transference issues of psychotherapy, and identity issues that transcend blood and biology.
May 6, 2012
This is a fantastically written, weighty book, different than almost anything I've ever read. Taking place in San Francisco in the mid-1970s, the country is gripped by Vietnam, the energy crisis, fear of nuclear war, and the panic generated by the Zodiac killer. The book's unnamed narrator is a disgraced college professor suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder, who is trying to pull his life back together as he is being investigated for an inappropriate relationship with a student. Determined to work on a lecture series but unable to resist the obsessions of his beat-up beach house, he rents an office in downtown San Francisco. Shortly after beginning his work, he discovers that from his office he can hear the constant din of a white noise machine used by a psychotherapist in a neighboring office. While that nearly unhinges him, he suddenly realizes that one client doesn't like the noise machine to be used during her therapy sessions—so he can hear everything she says during her analysis.
While at first, the patient discusses her challenges with her work as an economic analyst, and her relationships with her family and her female lover, the crux of her problem is revealed shortly thereafter—an adopted child, she is struggling with her "real" identity and what it means for the person she is. The narrator is fascinated, and the patient becomes his new obsession. Her questions lead her to a Catholic charity that moved freshly baptized orphans out of Germany after World War II. But after discovering her mother was named "Maria G," and disappeared after surrendering her infant daughter, that is as far as the patient's search can go. Determined not to lose his weekly glimpse into this patient's life, he takes the research into his own hands, and quickly finds the patient’s mother in records from a German displaced-persons camp. But he can't let on that he’s been eavesdropping, so he creates a persona at an adoption agency the patient has contacted, sends the reply "from" there, and mails it to the client. Through the wall, he hears how "his" patient is energized by the news, which drives him to unearth more clues and become more and more invested in her case. And the patient's journey to find her birth mother takes her a great distance, both physically and psychologically.
There are many improbable things about By Blood, but Ellen Ullman's storytelling ability is so powerful, you, like the patient herself, is content at times to gloss over the threads that don't quite make sense. This is a book that wrestles with the question of what role our biological and genetic identity truly has in determining the person we become. More than nature versus nurture, it is an exploration of whether you can ever transcend the circumstances into which you are born. The story of the Jewish struggles, particularly at the end of and after World War II, and both the horrors and the victories experienced by Holocaust survivors in the displaced-persons camps, are truly powerful. This book definitely transcends its simple beginnings of a man eavesdropping on an analysis patient, and while it leaves unanswered many questions, Ullman has created a powerful, moving book unlike any other.
While at first, the patient discusses her challenges with her work as an economic analyst, and her relationships with her family and her female lover, the crux of her problem is revealed shortly thereafter—an adopted child, she is struggling with her "real" identity and what it means for the person she is. The narrator is fascinated, and the patient becomes his new obsession. Her questions lead her to a Catholic charity that moved freshly baptized orphans out of Germany after World War II. But after discovering her mother was named "Maria G," and disappeared after surrendering her infant daughter, that is as far as the patient's search can go. Determined not to lose his weekly glimpse into this patient's life, he takes the research into his own hands, and quickly finds the patient’s mother in records from a German displaced-persons camp. But he can't let on that he’s been eavesdropping, so he creates a persona at an adoption agency the patient has contacted, sends the reply "from" there, and mails it to the client. Through the wall, he hears how "his" patient is energized by the news, which drives him to unearth more clues and become more and more invested in her case. And the patient's journey to find her birth mother takes her a great distance, both physically and psychologically.
There are many improbable things about By Blood, but Ellen Ullman's storytelling ability is so powerful, you, like the patient herself, is content at times to gloss over the threads that don't quite make sense. This is a book that wrestles with the question of what role our biological and genetic identity truly has in determining the person we become. More than nature versus nurture, it is an exploration of whether you can ever transcend the circumstances into which you are born. The story of the Jewish struggles, particularly at the end of and after World War II, and both the horrors and the victories experienced by Holocaust survivors in the displaced-persons camps, are truly powerful. This book definitely transcends its simple beginnings of a man eavesdropping on an analysis patient, and while it leaves unanswered many questions, Ullman has created a powerful, moving book unlike any other.
April 7, 2012
This book got a lot of good reviews but I'm afraid I just didn't like it at all. I found the narrative device to be way too contrived. I found the narrator to be so creepy as to be repulsive to me. Each of the main characters was filled with so much self-loathing that I could not muster up any degree of concern for them. But, I did read the whole thing, so something about it was compelling. It's just that when I finished I was left feeling like I had wasted my time.
March 11, 2012
The premise is simple and surprisingly not considered in more fiction: A man rents a work space in an old building and ends up next door to a psychiatrist. While most of her clients are muted by the doctor’s white noise machine, one patient cannot stand the whooshing unorganized sound and asks that she turn it off.
The man listening in -- and the patient -- in Ellen Ullman’s novel “By Blood” is nameless. But he latches on to the woman’s story as though the sessions are his own personal reality program. He falls into something that falls between love and paternal protectiveness. He becomes so obsessed with her and what she is going through that he develops disdain for the doctor, compassion for the patient and is forced to meddle, helping her in unseen ways.
Meanwhile he’s mad and getting madder in a frantic, dizzy, stumbling way that is very Edgar Allan Poe.
The man, a professor, is on leave from the university during the period of the Zodiac Killer and Patty Hearst’s kidnapping. He is being investigated for an inappropriate obsession, maybe even stalking, of a male student. He moves to San Francisco, rents a cottage near the water and office space in a building so old that the marble steps have bucked from years of use. His office is a small room with a door that links it to the doctor’s office. He’s so close that he can hear the swoosh of her nylons rubbing against each other as she shifts positions. When she smokes, the smell curls under the door. Every Wednesday the doctor meets up with the patient: a lesbian who works in finance and is sorting through relationship and identity issues, namely that she was adopted and is curious about her past and what it would mean to look like one of her relatives. He is immediately captivated by the theme: “I was like a person who had happened upon a novel fallen open at random,” he thinks.
The eavesdropper can relate. He comes from a long line of mental illness and he is envious of people who can separate themselves from the baggage of family. Would it be better to be an independent person, free from the knowledge that this relative and that relative committed suicide? To go blindly into the future not knowing what his chin will look like when he has aged? He thinks so.
The doctor wants the patient to shake down her adoptive mother for the details of her birth. The adoptive mother is as emotionally shaky as their relationship and must be about three martinis deep before she will spill any of the details. Eventually she reveals that the woman was born of a Jewish mother during World War II. She was given to a Catholic charities organization, which baptized her and sent her to America, where she was adopted by an off-shoot of a Catholic church near Chicago -- a cult whose leader balks when he learns that her birth mother was Jewish and gives the child to his son, who has left the church.
The patient, Protestant by birth, has her mind blown. Everything she has believed about her life is topsy-turvey. She’s Jewish. She came from Germany. She was abandoned by her original adopter. While smart in areas of finance and numbers, the patient doesn’t have the research skills to even know how to begin a hunt for her birth mother, so the professor steps in. He sends her anonymous packages to guide her hunt, the address label bearing the fictitious stamp of a researcher at an organization in Chicago.
In the meantime, he is losing his mind. He is subsisting on these weekly sessions, planning his life around them. He sits in the dark and doesn’t move so as not to attract attention. He arrives when the doctor is on break so she doesn’t hear the door open. He receives notice that the university has begun a more thorough investigation; He digs in deeper to the patient to distract himself. His rental home is in shambles with messes he doesn't remember making.
This book is a real thinker about identity and how upbringing molds people and what is changeable. It’s about recognizing one’s face in the face of a relative and about not wanting to see that map of the future. It is also a Holocaust narrative from the perspective of a woman who shed her Jewish identity and married a family friend who was Catholic, converting and changing her name and then faking pregnancies so she can pull the Aryan fetus trump card in the face of being sent to a work camp. Meanwhile, all around her, she must see the faces of old friends who know what she has done. Ultimately, this doesn’t save her from a fate similar to her neighbors.
The story is told in this very frantic way and the narrator is a real creeper. It’s hard to stop reading which is both satisfying and not: Ullman has mastered the art of the cliff hanger, although it becomes a little self-conscious about midway through the story when every chapter ends with someone taking a deep breath, seemingly seconds from a big reveal about the patient’s background -- only to start the next chapter with a long story that ends with another cliff hanger. These frustrations aside, the story is a real tickler filled with intrigue and "Yeah, but then!" moments.
The man listening in -- and the patient -- in Ellen Ullman’s novel “By Blood” is nameless. But he latches on to the woman’s story as though the sessions are his own personal reality program. He falls into something that falls between love and paternal protectiveness. He becomes so obsessed with her and what she is going through that he develops disdain for the doctor, compassion for the patient and is forced to meddle, helping her in unseen ways.
Meanwhile he’s mad and getting madder in a frantic, dizzy, stumbling way that is very Edgar Allan Poe.
The man, a professor, is on leave from the university during the period of the Zodiac Killer and Patty Hearst’s kidnapping. He is being investigated for an inappropriate obsession, maybe even stalking, of a male student. He moves to San Francisco, rents a cottage near the water and office space in a building so old that the marble steps have bucked from years of use. His office is a small room with a door that links it to the doctor’s office. He’s so close that he can hear the swoosh of her nylons rubbing against each other as she shifts positions. When she smokes, the smell curls under the door. Every Wednesday the doctor meets up with the patient: a lesbian who works in finance and is sorting through relationship and identity issues, namely that she was adopted and is curious about her past and what it would mean to look like one of her relatives. He is immediately captivated by the theme: “I was like a person who had happened upon a novel fallen open at random,” he thinks.
The eavesdropper can relate. He comes from a long line of mental illness and he is envious of people who can separate themselves from the baggage of family. Would it be better to be an independent person, free from the knowledge that this relative and that relative committed suicide? To go blindly into the future not knowing what his chin will look like when he has aged? He thinks so.
The doctor wants the patient to shake down her adoptive mother for the details of her birth. The adoptive mother is as emotionally shaky as their relationship and must be about three martinis deep before she will spill any of the details. Eventually she reveals that the woman was born of a Jewish mother during World War II. She was given to a Catholic charities organization, which baptized her and sent her to America, where she was adopted by an off-shoot of a Catholic church near Chicago -- a cult whose leader balks when he learns that her birth mother was Jewish and gives the child to his son, who has left the church.
The patient, Protestant by birth, has her mind blown. Everything she has believed about her life is topsy-turvey. She’s Jewish. She came from Germany. She was abandoned by her original adopter. While smart in areas of finance and numbers, the patient doesn’t have the research skills to even know how to begin a hunt for her birth mother, so the professor steps in. He sends her anonymous packages to guide her hunt, the address label bearing the fictitious stamp of a researcher at an organization in Chicago.
In the meantime, he is losing his mind. He is subsisting on these weekly sessions, planning his life around them. He sits in the dark and doesn’t move so as not to attract attention. He arrives when the doctor is on break so she doesn’t hear the door open. He receives notice that the university has begun a more thorough investigation; He digs in deeper to the patient to distract himself. His rental home is in shambles with messes he doesn't remember making.
This book is a real thinker about identity and how upbringing molds people and what is changeable. It’s about recognizing one’s face in the face of a relative and about not wanting to see that map of the future. It is also a Holocaust narrative from the perspective of a woman who shed her Jewish identity and married a family friend who was Catholic, converting and changing her name and then faking pregnancies so she can pull the Aryan fetus trump card in the face of being sent to a work camp. Meanwhile, all around her, she must see the faces of old friends who know what she has done. Ultimately, this doesn’t save her from a fate similar to her neighbors.
The story is told in this very frantic way and the narrator is a real creeper. It’s hard to stop reading which is both satisfying and not: Ullman has mastered the art of the cliff hanger, although it becomes a little self-conscious about midway through the story when every chapter ends with someone taking a deep breath, seemingly seconds from a big reveal about the patient’s background -- only to start the next chapter with a long story that ends with another cliff hanger. These frustrations aside, the story is a real tickler filled with intrigue and "Yeah, but then!" moments.
December 12, 2012
I could not put this very unusual book down and then was terribly disappointed by the end. The author presented three characters, each with a boatload of mystery, but left two of them as mystifying as ever. We learn a lot about the patient, a Holocaust survivor who initially starts therapy to deal with the fact that she was adopted and felt as if she belonged to no one. The narrator is a college professor on leave for undisclosed disciplinary reasons. He rents an office next door to the therapist and is able to eavesdrop on the sessions. He becomes obsessed with the patient and, unbeknownst to anyone, using what he has overheard, resolves the mystery of her birth and time before adoption. But the therapist also has a intriguing background that is never revealed and we learn nothing about the narrator and the origin of his very strange ways. I hate to be pulled along by a good story and then left hanging out to dry by the last pages. For that reason, I cannot recommend this book.
July 10, 2020
3.5 stars
This is such a well done and carefully constructed book. I’m dying to know what happens next, but I can understand that that wasn’t the focus of the story. The story is about the patient and not the narrator, but one can’t help wondering his fate.
I would recommend this book for people with very specific tastes. I don’t think I’d have read the book if I knew the entire story like I know it now, but I’m not disappointed I did, nor do I feel like it was a waste of time to read. It’s so well written and formed that I find myself pleased I read it.
This is such a well done and carefully constructed book. I’m dying to know what happens next, but I can understand that that wasn’t the focus of the story. The story is about the patient and not the narrator, but one can’t help wondering his fate.
I would recommend this book for people with very specific tastes. I don’t think I’d have read the book if I knew the entire story like I know it now, but I’m not disappointed I did, nor do I feel like it was a waste of time to read. It’s so well written and formed that I find myself pleased I read it.
December 3, 2011
I have mixed feelings on this book. If I eliminate the narrator, the story of the nameless patient in search of her birth parents and her origins is a powerful one. The journey is rich in information on Europe during the Second World War, the Nazis and the Jewish people's battle to survive, and what it would feel like to find out you'd been born in this environment.
That being said, that part of the story was far too removed for me. We learn all this through the eavesdropping of the narrator, a mentally unstable man whom we learn little about. All of the patient's emotions are interpreted and given to us through this narrator. The details are there but the emotion is lacking.
Other problems I had with this book: The narrator rents an office to supposedly do some sort of research, yet he never does that. In fact, he spends his time doing a whole lot of nothing. He seems to have an endless supply of money, since he doesn't work and never worries about paying rent or buying food, but he lost his job and isn't looking for another. Aside from his obsession with the patient and his occasional desire to stalk random people, we learn little about him. For me, his character is more of a block to the real story than enriching to the story. I couldn't connect to him, didn't have enough detail to know who he was. And because everything else came through this character, I never got to know the patient well enough to connect, either.
The very fact that he hears every single word of what goes on in the office beside him didn't feel believable. Not only does he hear the entirety of each conversation, he also hears subtle things like the therapist's nylons rustling as she crosses her legs and the patient pulling a tissue from a box. I can't hear these things from one room of my house to another, much less from one office to the next, with closed doors between.
Overall, the book is slow moving. I felt like I was digging through weeds to get to what could have been a powerful story.
That being said, that part of the story was far too removed for me. We learn all this through the eavesdropping of the narrator, a mentally unstable man whom we learn little about. All of the patient's emotions are interpreted and given to us through this narrator. The details are there but the emotion is lacking.
Other problems I had with this book: The narrator rents an office to supposedly do some sort of research, yet he never does that. In fact, he spends his time doing a whole lot of nothing. He seems to have an endless supply of money, since he doesn't work and never worries about paying rent or buying food, but he lost his job and isn't looking for another. Aside from his obsession with the patient and his occasional desire to stalk random people, we learn little about him. For me, his character is more of a block to the real story than enriching to the story. I couldn't connect to him, didn't have enough detail to know who he was. And because everything else came through this character, I never got to know the patient well enough to connect, either.
The very fact that he hears every single word of what goes on in the office beside him didn't feel believable. Not only does he hear the entirety of each conversation, he also hears subtle things like the therapist's nylons rustling as she crosses her legs and the patient pulling a tissue from a box. I can't hear these things from one room of my house to another, much less from one office to the next, with closed doors between.
Overall, the book is slow moving. I felt like I was digging through weeds to get to what could have been a powerful story.
February 13, 2013
Stepping into the language of this book is like entering a warm familiar room. Ullman astutely captures the voice of her narrator from the very first page. For me, the effect was not unlike reading London or Conrad, by a voice unmarked by overt modernism. And yet, it's not antique or unaware of its time. Her control and astute deliberation with language, her comfort in the telling voice, her overall conceptual daring with this story speaks only to her mastery of her craft and art. Simply said, I have read two books by Ullman now, and I will forever read whatever she publishes as soon as she publishes it. She is one of the finest writers working today.
There are a few moments in the middle where the narrative sags, where the props of the story are showing like bones under thinner skin, but this is small complaint for the great flesh of this work. She manages drama without melodrama, grief and emotion without pathos or cliche.
May she live a long life, may her career inhabit it, and may she never run out of whatever spark it is that brought her to first tell a story.
There are a few moments in the middle where the narrative sags, where the props of the story are showing like bones under thinner skin, but this is small complaint for the great flesh of this work. She manages drama without melodrama, grief and emotion without pathos or cliche.
May she live a long life, may her career inhabit it, and may she never run out of whatever spark it is that brought her to first tell a story.
February 15, 2013
Narrative as poison working in the veins, seductive and benumbing. Reader as addict, greedy and self-interested. History as spectre, prismatic and unsettling. Memory as pathology, compulsive and circular. Family as Stockholm syndrome, insulated and perverse. Therapy as midwifery, hasty and imperilled.
Nabakov and De Palma had a baby.
Nabakov and De Palma had a baby.
July 1, 2012
Maybe it is the setting of this book (San Francisco in the mid-1970s) or maybe it is the novels's exquisite use of aural imagery that reminds me of the film "The Conversation". Like the film, this book expertly dangles bits of a woman's life to the reader, as the narrator eavesdrops through the all-too-thin adjoining door between his office and a psychiatrists office. The narrator (a mentally-ill college professor on leave during an ethics investigation into his behavior) becomes increasing engrossed in the story of one of the psychiatrist's patients as she attempts to unravel the skein of her emotions about her adoption, to the point where the life of the patient becomes an over-riding obsession. As the narrator silently lies in the dark listening to the next chapters in the story next door, he wrestles with his desire to follow the patient home, to connect with her, and in some instances, to do her harm. Ullman's construction of tension and sense of pacing, as we watch the narrator's struggles, is reminiscent of Hitchcock.
In "The Conversation", Harry Caul is always the center of the story, and his subsequent devolution into madness is all the more affecting for it. Here, Ullman structures the book so heavily around the patient's story that, while the story is entirely gripping and fascinating, the reader is left to wonder more about the narrator's past and motivations which are hinted at, but never fully revealed. Ultimately, this book becomes about knowability -- historical and personal truth become eroded over time, and in some cases what is "true" will never be known. As the patient delves more and more into trying to discover her origins (with a little help from her silent partner next door), she continually finds herself contending with the conflicting memories of (conflicted) others, their (and her own) reluctance to explore the past, and the lack of "official" records from agencies and governments during WWII. The book seems to ask, "Who are we, when we don't know from where we came?" and "How do our identities and ethics change when acted upon by historical forces beyond our control?" It also addresses the limits of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and each other. Our accidental geneologist's madness and obsession is ultimately another story lost in the summer fogs of San Francisco, and perhaps we don't feel as sympathetic to him as viewers of "The Conversation" feel about Harry Caul. The stories in "By Blood" are none-the-less affecting and heart-wrenching.
In "The Conversation", Harry Caul is always the center of the story, and his subsequent devolution into madness is all the more affecting for it. Here, Ullman structures the book so heavily around the patient's story that, while the story is entirely gripping and fascinating, the reader is left to wonder more about the narrator's past and motivations which are hinted at, but never fully revealed. Ultimately, this book becomes about knowability -- historical and personal truth become eroded over time, and in some cases what is "true" will never be known. As the patient delves more and more into trying to discover her origins (with a little help from her silent partner next door), she continually finds herself contending with the conflicting memories of (conflicted) others, their (and her own) reluctance to explore the past, and the lack of "official" records from agencies and governments during WWII. The book seems to ask, "Who are we, when we don't know from where we came?" and "How do our identities and ethics change when acted upon by historical forces beyond our control?" It also addresses the limits of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and each other. Our accidental geneologist's madness and obsession is ultimately another story lost in the summer fogs of San Francisco, and perhaps we don't feel as sympathetic to him as viewers of "The Conversation" feel about Harry Caul. The stories in "By Blood" are none-the-less affecting and heart-wrenching.
August 4, 2012
During the year of 1974, a strange and mysterious professor travels to San Francisco and rents a small office in order to continue his research on the third part of Aeschylus's trilogy. He has run into some trouble at his academic job (never made very clear) and is most likely on academic leave or has the possibility of losing tenure lying over his head. Ironically, his small rented office gives him just the fuel to fire off his academic flames.
He doesn't realize it at first, but he can hear the voices coming from next door. The next door's office is rented by a psychoanalyst who is analyzing a patient of interest to the professor - a lesbian economist who was adopted at birth. Though the professor himself believes that talking cures are useless, he loves to vicariously listen in to the therapist and this particular patient. The professor comes from a very troubled background and history which for years he has tried to understand - suicides, manic depression, and obsessive compulsive disorder to name a few. The patient has been adopted very early in her life and there are are lot of complicated issues associated with this adoption. Paramount, is the fact that the girl was adopted from a catholic agency in Europe though she is in fact a Jew. The patient is trying to put pieces of her life together and understand why her parents would have adopted her. They are so withholding, so typically WASP and not likely to show her much emotional demonstrativeness.
The professor obsessively listens to the sessions of analyst and analysand, sometimes staying in his office for the whole night. He worries if the patient does not show up and his life becomes centered on the weekly meetings to which he is the secret witness. The writing has a very gothic feel to it, some of it reminding me of Joyce Carol Oates. Ullman is able to see the dark side of human nature and write about it very unapologetically. She views human nature as basically dark. There is little, if any, laughter, smiling, or lightness in this book. It is dark and, if any light would be visible, it would be a pinpoint dot emanating from a tiny chasm.
This is a puzzling exploration of the human mind, at once an attempt to reach inside and also an attempt to remain detached from the 'other'. I recommend this book for those who like solipsistic writing, who can read Kafka and feel content when finished. Myself, while enjoying the book, it is certainly not one I would read a second time. I do look forward, however, to Ullman's future writings.
Comment
He doesn't realize it at first, but he can hear the voices coming from next door. The next door's office is rented by a psychoanalyst who is analyzing a patient of interest to the professor - a lesbian economist who was adopted at birth. Though the professor himself believes that talking cures are useless, he loves to vicariously listen in to the therapist and this particular patient. The professor comes from a very troubled background and history which for years he has tried to understand - suicides, manic depression, and obsessive compulsive disorder to name a few. The patient has been adopted very early in her life and there are are lot of complicated issues associated with this adoption. Paramount, is the fact that the girl was adopted from a catholic agency in Europe though she is in fact a Jew. The patient is trying to put pieces of her life together and understand why her parents would have adopted her. They are so withholding, so typically WASP and not likely to show her much emotional demonstrativeness.
The professor obsessively listens to the sessions of analyst and analysand, sometimes staying in his office for the whole night. He worries if the patient does not show up and his life becomes centered on the weekly meetings to which he is the secret witness. The writing has a very gothic feel to it, some of it reminding me of Joyce Carol Oates. Ullman is able to see the dark side of human nature and write about it very unapologetically. She views human nature as basically dark. There is little, if any, laughter, smiling, or lightness in this book. It is dark and, if any light would be visible, it would be a pinpoint dot emanating from a tiny chasm.
This is a puzzling exploration of the human mind, at once an attempt to reach inside and also an attempt to remain detached from the 'other'. I recommend this book for those who like solipsistic writing, who can read Kafka and feel content when finished. Myself, while enjoying the book, it is certainly not one I would read a second time. I do look forward, however, to Ullman's future writings.
Comment
October 2, 2013
Man is suspended from a university for some nameless reason. Man rents an office in a building in San Francisco. Man overhears a therapist's session with a patient. Man becomes obsessed with patient and her story, even though he never sees her or the therapist.
This book does one thing well, and that is building mystery. The patient is adopted, and we learn a little bit about her birth mother, and then a little bit more. Then a little bit more. Then the Man begins to act on the information. One thing the book lacks is any reason why I should care. We know next to nothing about the Man, not even his name. We don't know where he taught, what he did, if he's entirely delusional. And the patient is a sympathetic figure, but she's looking for some great answer that doesn't exist.
The book touches on the Holocaust, and that's where it's best. We can feel how horrible it was, and empathize with the people who endured it. But except for that section of the book, I wanted to tell everyone to just get over it. I had no sympathy for any of them, and frankly I hoped none of them would find the answers they were looking for. Miserable. The lot of them.
This book does one thing well, and that is building mystery. The patient is adopted, and we learn a little bit about her birth mother, and then a little bit more. Then a little bit more. Then the Man begins to act on the information. One thing the book lacks is any reason why I should care. We know next to nothing about the Man, not even his name. We don't know where he taught, what he did, if he's entirely delusional. And the patient is a sympathetic figure, but she's looking for some great answer that doesn't exist.
The book touches on the Holocaust, and that's where it's best. We can feel how horrible it was, and empathize with the people who endured it. But except for that section of the book, I wanted to tell everyone to just get over it. I had no sympathy for any of them, and frankly I hoped none of them would find the answers they were looking for. Miserable. The lot of them.
October 23, 2021
oh FUCK YA
I like slapped this book into my hand in glee when I finished it. Fantastic ending. Such show-don't-tell, particularly when it comes to unreliable narration (it's among the most effective examples I've encountered). The plot is fun and pretty engrossing (particularly if you've got voyeur/people-watching tendencies), but the atmospheric, "wtf is going on", mild-creep build is the winner, and it pays off in the last two pages.
I won't speak for the conversation around Judaism occurring throughout, but the conversation around lesbian'ism' was fascinating, and it's always refreshing to read books written by lesbians: the queerness infuses the narrative, and it changes things out of the heteronormative in surprising and excellent ways. It's also a book that's meant to be pulled apart -- not one that if you dissect it, you'll miss something -- but that if you dissect it, you'll find something.
Fun, and smart, and just like a good read.
I like slapped this book into my hand in glee when I finished it. Fantastic ending. Such show-don't-tell, particularly when it comes to unreliable narration (it's among the most effective examples I've encountered). The plot is fun and pretty engrossing (particularly if you've got voyeur/people-watching tendencies), but the atmospheric, "wtf is going on", mild-creep build is the winner, and it pays off in the last two pages.
I won't speak for the conversation around Judaism occurring throughout, but the conversation around lesbian'ism' was fascinating, and it's always refreshing to read books written by lesbians: the queerness infuses the narrative, and it changes things out of the heteronormative in surprising and excellent ways. It's also a book that's meant to be pulled apart -- not one that if you dissect it, you'll miss something -- but that if you dissect it, you'll find something.
Fun, and smart, and just like a good read.
April 21, 2012
It is the 1970's and a disgraced professor has come to San Francisco, awaiting the judgement of his college. A tenured professor, there is an allegation of improper student contact, and now he must wait for the wheels of collegial justice to grind out his fate. Knowing that it will take months, he has fled to another city where he is to work on research and papers. It is an unsettled time in San Francisco. The peace and love generation has given way to terrorists similar to those who kidnapped Patty Hearst. The Zodiac killer is stalking the streets. There is unease everywhere, including the professor's mind.
He takes an office in a cheap location, and there he finds his solace. He is placed next to a psychiatrist's office, and the construction is so cheap that he can hear through the walls. Not everyone; for most patients there is a white noise machine. But one patient, the one that the professor begins to think of as 'his patient' wants the machine turned off and he can hear everything she says.
The patient is caught up in the same identity crisis the professor has fought his whole life. Both feel they don't belong anywhere, that there is something unique about them that sets them apart and makes them unlovable. The patient believes it is her past as an adopted child. The professor comes from a family rife with mental disease and suicides. Both struggle to determine if they are a product of their genes, fated at birth to become what they are, or if they have the strength to define themselves apart from their heredity.
The professor has spent years in therapy and has removed himself from that setting. Yet he finds himself drawn into the struggle of the patient as she confronts her adoptive parents. He uses his research skills to find her birth mother and the truth of her background and mails the results to her pretending to be a clerk at the adoption agency. He then sits back and waits to see what will happen, if his gift will enable the patient to move forward with her life or if the truth of her background will swamp her.
Ellen Ullman has written a brooding tale that draws the reader in hypnotically. Set in short chapters, the hour long therapy sessions are juxtaposed with the actions of the professors. The story rackets up the suspense as the truth is revealed a bit at a time. Will the therapist have the skills to free the patient, and the professor who looms in the background and is just as needy? This book is recommended for all readers, an atmospheric tale that will not soon be forgotten.
He takes an office in a cheap location, and there he finds his solace. He is placed next to a psychiatrist's office, and the construction is so cheap that he can hear through the walls. Not everyone; for most patients there is a white noise machine. But one patient, the one that the professor begins to think of as 'his patient' wants the machine turned off and he can hear everything she says.
The patient is caught up in the same identity crisis the professor has fought his whole life. Both feel they don't belong anywhere, that there is something unique about them that sets them apart and makes them unlovable. The patient believes it is her past as an adopted child. The professor comes from a family rife with mental disease and suicides. Both struggle to determine if they are a product of their genes, fated at birth to become what they are, or if they have the strength to define themselves apart from their heredity.
The professor has spent years in therapy and has removed himself from that setting. Yet he finds himself drawn into the struggle of the patient as she confronts her adoptive parents. He uses his research skills to find her birth mother and the truth of her background and mails the results to her pretending to be a clerk at the adoption agency. He then sits back and waits to see what will happen, if his gift will enable the patient to move forward with her life or if the truth of her background will swamp her.
Ellen Ullman has written a brooding tale that draws the reader in hypnotically. Set in short chapters, the hour long therapy sessions are juxtaposed with the actions of the professors. The story rackets up the suspense as the truth is revealed a bit at a time. Will the therapist have the skills to free the patient, and the professor who looms in the background and is just as needy? This book is recommended for all readers, an atmospheric tale that will not soon be forgotten.
September 2, 2012
This is a wonderful novel - great story, a fascinating aesthetic challenge, and a provocative dip into real history.
Set in the late 1970s, The story is about a disgraced academic who, while on hiatus from his university, takes an office in San Francisco to work on a research project. While there, he discovers that he can hear the therapy sessions being conducted by the analyst next door. He becomes fascinated and obsessed with the sessions for a young woman who is excavating her past. The protagonist listens to the sessions and becomes attached to the analysand: Himself an emotional basket-case, he feels that there are some common points between their situations.
After awhile, the therapy sessions come to an impasse, and the protagonist intervenes by sending some letters to the analysand.
At this point, that's about all I should say. The book is all about "listening in" on conversations, and what it means to constitute a fully-lived representation of life from fragments. What the reader does with this novel is not unlike what the protagonist does with what he overhears in the next room.
There is also a profound historical dimension to this novel: Much of the analysand's personal history is wrapped up with German Jews and their experience from 1935 to the 70s. One thing that is quite radical is that Ullman delves into the real history of the leading Jews in the liberation of Bergen-Belsen - e.g., Hadassah Bimko and Josef Rosensaft. Readers will think that these names and personae are made up: But they're not. Knowing a bit about Bergen-Belsen, I was shocked that Ullman went into the territory of these real people, who have living offspring. Daring stuff.
I've known about Ullman for awhile. She is the author of the crucial non-fiction essay about computer-mediated communication (CMC), "Come in, CQ," and also wrote one of the most important books about the impact of technology on communication, Close to the Machine. She also has a novel called The Bug, which is not quite as good, but an amazing read if you're a software developer. (Ullman was a software developer herself for quite awhile.)
The connection with CMC is important, because this novel takes up a lot of the themes that interested her in those non-fiction writings: Namely, can we really "connect" through a low-bandwidth channel? How cruel can we be through signs and symbols?
I hope this book gets the scrutiny and reward it deserves.
Set in the late 1970s, The story is about a disgraced academic who, while on hiatus from his university, takes an office in San Francisco to work on a research project. While there, he discovers that he can hear the therapy sessions being conducted by the analyst next door. He becomes fascinated and obsessed with the sessions for a young woman who is excavating her past. The protagonist listens to the sessions and becomes attached to the analysand: Himself an emotional basket-case, he feels that there are some common points between their situations.
After awhile, the therapy sessions come to an impasse, and the protagonist intervenes by sending some letters to the analysand.
At this point, that's about all I should say. The book is all about "listening in" on conversations, and what it means to constitute a fully-lived representation of life from fragments. What the reader does with this novel is not unlike what the protagonist does with what he overhears in the next room.
There is also a profound historical dimension to this novel: Much of the analysand's personal history is wrapped up with German Jews and their experience from 1935 to the 70s. One thing that is quite radical is that Ullman delves into the real history of the leading Jews in the liberation of Bergen-Belsen - e.g., Hadassah Bimko and Josef Rosensaft. Readers will think that these names and personae are made up: But they're not. Knowing a bit about Bergen-Belsen, I was shocked that Ullman went into the territory of these real people, who have living offspring. Daring stuff.
I've known about Ullman for awhile. She is the author of the crucial non-fiction essay about computer-mediated communication (CMC), "Come in, CQ," and also wrote one of the most important books about the impact of technology on communication, Close to the Machine. She also has a novel called The Bug, which is not quite as good, but an amazing read if you're a software developer. (Ullman was a software developer herself for quite awhile.)
The connection with CMC is important, because this novel takes up a lot of the themes that interested her in those non-fiction writings: Namely, can we really "connect" through a low-bandwidth channel? How cruel can we be through signs and symbols?
I hope this book gets the scrutiny and reward it deserves.
February 27, 2013
what a twisty, gnarly tale. if you're going to read it, start it on a friday and don't make any weekend plans. your life will be on hold til you're done with it.
we have two unnamed protagonists (one i shall call "the snoop", the other is generally referred to as "the patient") and one psychiatrist in the mix here, as well as some dark history, some of which is illuminated and some left in the shadows. all three, in different ways, have significant issues with their parental units.
so the questions arise: what of us comes from our parentals? what are we free to reject? how free of our history (both genetic and familial) can we ever be? obviously, we cannot choose any part of our physical inheritance; but if we cannot reject what we choose of our familial one, is there any such thing as an individual?
all these questions play out in a marvelously creepy 1976 San Francisco. our snoop, whose current joblessness may stem from nefarious deeds, takes an office next door to the psychiatrist's. he begins to overhear her sessions with the patient, and begins to attach himself in some distasteful ways to her therapy. i won't spoil anything, but pay attention to the language he uses when he first begins to speak of what he perceives as involvement with her; it'll give you the shivers.
my only complaint with the book is that the snoop's story is left in the dark--he apparently has some queasy family history, which is left for the most part unexplored. one can backfill a lot of his present story by the clues left along the way, and that's always a good choice on an author's part: to give the reader enough clues, but also enough blanks, that the reader can fill them in herself. but a bit too much is left unexplained.
the story has a definite propulsion--it will hook you somewhere near the spinal column and drag you along, like it or not. but it's not a story of events, of things exploding or bank robberies or danglings-off-the-side-of-a-building. it's all in the psychological, the emotional. more kudos to Ullman that she made it so compelling.
i am not sure how many re-readings this book will reward, but i'm keeping it on the shelves until i've answered that question at least once.
we have two unnamed protagonists (one i shall call "the snoop", the other is generally referred to as "the patient") and one psychiatrist in the mix here, as well as some dark history, some of which is illuminated and some left in the shadows. all three, in different ways, have significant issues with their parental units.
so the questions arise: what of us comes from our parentals? what are we free to reject? how free of our history (both genetic and familial) can we ever be? obviously, we cannot choose any part of our physical inheritance; but if we cannot reject what we choose of our familial one, is there any such thing as an individual?
all these questions play out in a marvelously creepy 1976 San Francisco. our snoop, whose current joblessness may stem from nefarious deeds, takes an office next door to the psychiatrist's. he begins to overhear her sessions with the patient, and begins to attach himself in some distasteful ways to her therapy. i won't spoil anything, but pay attention to the language he uses when he first begins to speak of what he perceives as involvement with her; it'll give you the shivers.
my only complaint with the book is that the snoop's story is left in the dark--he apparently has some queasy family history, which is left for the most part unexplored. one can backfill a lot of his present story by the clues left along the way, and that's always a good choice on an author's part: to give the reader enough clues, but also enough blanks, that the reader can fill them in herself. but a bit too much is left unexplained.
the story has a definite propulsion--it will hook you somewhere near the spinal column and drag you along, like it or not. but it's not a story of events, of things exploding or bank robberies or danglings-off-the-side-of-a-building. it's all in the psychological, the emotional. more kudos to Ullman that she made it so compelling.
i am not sure how many re-readings this book will reward, but i'm keeping it on the shelves until i've answered that question at least once.
September 24, 2013
By Blood by Ellen Ullman
A fascinating human study on so many levels. The narrator, a disgraced professor, flees to San Francisco, trying to put some form back into his life. We only receive dribs and drabs of reasons for his disgrace throughout the novel, but it is of a stalking nature. He rents an office space in a rather run down section of town, that turns out to be next-door to a psychotherapist's office. With paper thin walls our narrator is able to hear every word that is said in the adjoining office.
Thus begins the patient's story, we are not told names, we read neither the narrator's name, nor the patients. For good reason. This is a story of identity, how we as humans obtain our identity, it's source, how we can claim our own version of life. Whether we choose to take the path of least resistance, or not.
Ullman has an almost Nabokovian way of leading the reader to relish our unsavory narrator's actions. To sympathize, even empathize with his struggles against his worse self, and a struggle it is, no doubt about it. His victories against his demons are actually stupendous, his defeats equally horrendous. Ullman describes in detail a man in agony, and despair.
The author's physical descriptions of the office building's architecture, the very changeable weather of San Francisco are all rendered in a painterly, emotive style. The novel takes place in the mid 1970's, so many of the political events of the time are woven into the tale. The fall of Saigon, Patty Hurst's kidnapping and finally her arrest. We vividly feel the times, and they are disruptive, colorful and frankly, scary as hell.
Highly Recommended.
A fascinating human study on so many levels. The narrator, a disgraced professor, flees to San Francisco, trying to put some form back into his life. We only receive dribs and drabs of reasons for his disgrace throughout the novel, but it is of a stalking nature. He rents an office space in a rather run down section of town, that turns out to be next-door to a psychotherapist's office. With paper thin walls our narrator is able to hear every word that is said in the adjoining office.
Thus begins the patient's story, we are not told names, we read neither the narrator's name, nor the patients. For good reason. This is a story of identity, how we as humans obtain our identity, it's source, how we can claim our own version of life. Whether we choose to take the path of least resistance, or not.
Ullman has an almost Nabokovian way of leading the reader to relish our unsavory narrator's actions. To sympathize, even empathize with his struggles against his worse self, and a struggle it is, no doubt about it. His victories against his demons are actually stupendous, his defeats equally horrendous. Ullman describes in detail a man in agony, and despair.
The author's physical descriptions of the office building's architecture, the very changeable weather of San Francisco are all rendered in a painterly, emotive style. The novel takes place in the mid 1970's, so many of the political events of the time are woven into the tale. The fall of Saigon, Patty Hurst's kidnapping and finally her arrest. We vividly feel the times, and they are disruptive, colorful and frankly, scary as hell.
Highly Recommended.
May 31, 2013
From my review for the Jewish Quarterly:
"One thing that makes By Blood so engaging is how often the narrator’s relationship to the story reflects and exposes the reading experience: he, too, is having an encounter reduced to words and the ideas they provoke in the imagination. There is something arresting about the way he reminds us, half-way through the novel, that he has no idea what the main characters look like – for if he hasn’t, then of course neither can we, who are at his mercy. Whatever images we have constructed for ourselves are suddenly erased – including our images of the narrator himself. Similarly, when the narrator editorialises, his interpretations might be the opposite of the reader’s, but his are set in the black-and-white stone of type; our own unfixed ideas must to some extent break on them.
"This layering, in which we are effectively reading a reading that seeks to overpower, to over-write, our own, leads to a sort of dissonance: By Blood mimics the most familiar forms – the detective novel, the family mystery – while drawing back the curtain that hides the levers by which they are manipulated. Such an awareness of the mechanics of reading could be distracting. Because Ullman has built it so naturally into the narrative, and because the slightly otherworldly space she has constructed easily accommodates the artificial, in fact it captivates, straining – albeit gently – both convention and credulity, and successfully proves both are muscles that enjoy the exercise."
"One thing that makes By Blood so engaging is how often the narrator’s relationship to the story reflects and exposes the reading experience: he, too, is having an encounter reduced to words and the ideas they provoke in the imagination. There is something arresting about the way he reminds us, half-way through the novel, that he has no idea what the main characters look like – for if he hasn’t, then of course neither can we, who are at his mercy. Whatever images we have constructed for ourselves are suddenly erased – including our images of the narrator himself. Similarly, when the narrator editorialises, his interpretations might be the opposite of the reader’s, but his are set in the black-and-white stone of type; our own unfixed ideas must to some extent break on them.
"This layering, in which we are effectively reading a reading that seeks to overpower, to over-write, our own, leads to a sort of dissonance: By Blood mimics the most familiar forms – the detective novel, the family mystery – while drawing back the curtain that hides the levers by which they are manipulated. Such an awareness of the mechanics of reading could be distracting. Because Ullman has built it so naturally into the narrative, and because the slightly otherworldly space she has constructed easily accommodates the artificial, in fact it captivates, straining – albeit gently – both convention and credulity, and successfully proves both are muscles that enjoy the exercise."
February 9, 2012
Ellen Ullman's "By Blood" is a slow starter, and I must confess that I almost abandoned the book. However, once it got going, the book had me enthralled.
The first-person narrator, an unnamed male professor, is under investigation at his university during the early 1970s. He rents an office in which to do some writing, on the premise that he will function better by leaving his home for a certain number of hours each day. The office turns out to be next door to a psychiatrist's practice. The walls are thin, so the doctor uses a white noise machine for privacy.
Except there is one patient who cannot stand the sound of the white noise machine, so it is turned off during her sessions. The narrator starts eavesdropping on the sessions and discovers that the patient is adopted and trying to find her mother -- a Jewish concentration camp survivor who surrendered her infant for adoption.
The professor makes it his business to assist the patient in her search while still remaining anonymous.
Once the search process gets going, the book really picks up. I will not post spoilers here, but suffice to say that there are numerous twists and turns and some completely unexpected events that come from the professor's singular decision.
Fans of literary fiction are sure to enjoy this work. Highly recommended.
The first-person narrator, an unnamed male professor, is under investigation at his university during the early 1970s. He rents an office in which to do some writing, on the premise that he will function better by leaving his home for a certain number of hours each day. The office turns out to be next door to a psychiatrist's practice. The walls are thin, so the doctor uses a white noise machine for privacy.
Except there is one patient who cannot stand the sound of the white noise machine, so it is turned off during her sessions. The narrator starts eavesdropping on the sessions and discovers that the patient is adopted and trying to find her mother -- a Jewish concentration camp survivor who surrendered her infant for adoption.
The professor makes it his business to assist the patient in her search while still remaining anonymous.
Once the search process gets going, the book really picks up. I will not post spoilers here, but suffice to say that there are numerous twists and turns and some completely unexpected events that come from the professor's singular decision.
Fans of literary fiction are sure to enjoy this work. Highly recommended.
May 23, 2019
A professor on administrative leave accidentally overhears a psychoanalysis session in the office next door and gets drawn into the story of a woman who was adopted. This begins a habit of regularly eavesdropping on her sessions and he begins to secretly influence her search for her birth mother. Both the professor and the woman are struggling with where they came from. He wishes to be freed from the genetics and influence of his family. She wishes to find out who she really is after a childhood of feeling out of place in her adoptive family. But her search for her birth mother leads her to find out things she wished she didn't know.
This novel deals with questions about our blood ties and fate itself. How much of who I am is inherited from my family? Do my genetics determine what I will become? The author artfully explores these questions in the story of the professor and the adopted woman. I was hooked from the beginning and had trouble putting it down once I got started. A great read!
This novel deals with questions about our blood ties and fate itself. How much of who I am is inherited from my family? Do my genetics determine what I will become? The author artfully explores these questions in the story of the professor and the adopted woman. I was hooked from the beginning and had trouble putting it down once I got started. A great read!
February 17, 2013
I couldn't put this book down. I mean, I have been making waffles and trying to keep reading to get to the end without getting burnt. I can't say whether I liked it, because I admire it so much as a work of art and yet I don't know how to feel about the content. The unreliable narrator is perfect--I can't decide whether he was a maniacal stalker or a kind person. The author exploits his distorted POV so beautifully. I loved the protagonist. I can't decide how I feel about how the author brought in themes of Jewish identity, the Holocaust, and lesbianism. OK, let me leave it at this. The book is good. It seemed to echo both Kafka and Nabokov...
August 27, 2014
I have wanted to read this since it came out two years ago. It got picked from my list of suggestions by one of my reading groups and most of us liked the intricate plot, though a couple readers found too many improbabilities and one took issue with some of the Holocaust facts.
The setting is San Francisco in the 1970s. The subject matter is closed adoption, identity due to family influence vs lack of identity due to being adopted. Psychiatry, lesbian relationships, the Holocaust and Israel, and hardly a single balanced or likable character all added up to an ambitious mix. I could not put it down.
The setting is San Francisco in the 1970s. The subject matter is closed adoption, identity due to family influence vs lack of identity due to being adopted. Psychiatry, lesbian relationships, the Holocaust and Israel, and hardly a single balanced or likable character all added up to an ambitious mix. I could not put it down.
July 26, 2013
I'd maybe even rate this with another half or whole star. Compelling plot points,: sicko voyeruristic expelled college professor trying to rid himself of his demons not only spies on a patient in her therapy sessions with her psychiatrist but becomes so obsessed with the patient's life that he does what he thinks will help her in finding her birth mother. Good read!
August 28, 2014
Amazing! The frames within frames of one unreliable narrator after another. She is two out of two for novels!
April 4, 2013
Then all at once I was frightened. How quickly I could come to hate her—she who was moments ago my icon of self-creation. I must be careful, I thought. I have traveled this path before. I must not go there. I therefore forced down my anger; sat still as my annoyance ebbed. It took all my self-control, but I succeeded, congratulating myself that I had changed, that I could be otherwise than I’d been. I turned my ear to the lovely pitch of the patient’s voice, her beautiful whiskey alto, and once again let it play above me as music, staccato now, legato then, piano and forte. My dear patient, I thought, forgive me! And how my heart contracted when she suddenly sobbed and cried out:
I don’t understand! How could they get me from a place they hate? How could they? I know it sounds crazy, but I feel I’m tainted. That Father looks at me and sees this mark: Catholic.
But you are not changed, said the therapist. Your being, your self, is the same, whether you came from a reed basket, a Protestant church, or a Catholic agency.
This has nothing to do with who I am! shouted the patient. It’s a mark on me before I was anyone. No matter what I am!
She was breathing forcefully, and I thought she would finally cry. But she contained herself and fell silent.
***
By Blood, Ellen Ullman’s second novel and third book, is a strange, often unsettling bit of literary voyeurism. The protagonist of this sordid tale is an unnamed fifty-year-old disgraced university professor awaiting the judgement of the Professional Ethics Committee. It’s never directly spelled out what his disgrace was, only that it was sexual in nature and involved a young male student—the details of their encounter are, to the novel’s benefit, kept decidedly vague. In an effort to keep his career from falling apart entirely, and to better occupy his mind, he leases an office space in a building shared by a therapist in San Francisco in the late summer of 1974 to prepare a series of lectures on The Eumenides.
However, in place of his work the narrator instead finds himself captivated, almost immediately, by the therapy sessions of a young lesbian attempting to unravel her past and track down her birth parents. The young unnamed woman’s sessions travel with almost perfect audio clarity between the walls separating her therapist’s walls from the Spartan office of our unbalanced and progressively more disturbing narrator. As the professor becomes more interested—and more involved in the patient’s story, he gradually inserts himself into the tale. At first his interest is merely a curiosity, but curiosity quickly leads to almost telegraphed obsession, then to an unnatural sort of fatherly protection and mistrust of Dr. Dora Schussler, the therapist, as he turns the patient’s search for self-identification into an academic project, in the end assuming only he knows what is best for the young wayward.
Set amidst the Zodiac killings of the mid-seventies, By Blood is a highly crafted literary mystery. The professor narrating the novel’s events is at first presented as an arrogant, entitled man. Through practiced attentiveness and an overeager imagination, he is able to construct a fully three-dimensional image of the patient’s therapy sessions—using details such as the smell of a particular brand of cigarette smoked by Dr. Schussler, or the sound she makes when she rubs her nylons together as the paint he applies to the setting built in his mind. The professor’s incredible ability to take individual details and run with them affords him a distraction from his own life and problems; periodic memories and half-crystalized thoughts reveal only what’s needed from a man whose family life was marked by “long bloodlines of mad people stretching back in time, suicides running in our veins the way blue eyes were passed down in saner clans.” It isn’t long before his many-layered neurosis overwhelms his manicured, erudite self, and the personality the reader is forced to hold hands with for the novel’s duration is one unhinged and ignorant to such ideas as “privacy” and “professional conduct.”
Opposite to the professor is the object of his fascination: the patient. Her life, as we learn through the professor’s aural voyeurism, is uncertain; she does not know entirely what she wants in a lover, how best to navigate the waters of her lesbianism with less than supportive parents, or the truth of her origins. Her adoptive mother is an emotional black hole, speaks often in the future imperative (a fantastically passive aggressive approach to parenting), and refuses to accept her daughter’s sexuality; her adoptive father is a man disowned by his own cult leader of a father and harbours a deep and at first glance irrational hatred of Catholics. We learn that, through the professor’s unknown-to-others intervention, the patient was abandoned during World War II by a Jewish mother who had married an Aryan man. She did so to attempt to protect herself from Hitler’s concentration camps. The patient was at first adopted by her adoptive father’s father, Grandfather Avery, who in turn rejected her (he’d been under the impression, vicious as despicable as he was, that he’d adopted a pure-blooded Aryan child and not some Jewish girl who’d simply been baptized Catholic). The patient’s story is so attractive to the professor as he sees, forced or not, fragments of his own self in her: “How like me she was, I thought: never properly loved, not trusting therefore, believing only in the picture of the world constructed by her analyzing mind.”
Set firmly (and unknowingly) between the professor and the patient is the therapist: Dr. Dora Schussler. Dr. Schussler is the only named character of the three main; she is the story’s fulcrum and, eventually, its final curtain. Dr. Schussler, without knowing it, is the professor’s primary antagonist—a therapist he assumes at times to be less than competent, unworthy of the patient’s attention and respect. He listens carefully to supposedly private conversations shared between Dr. Schussler and an always outside-of-the-scene therapist named Dr. Gurevitch, a contemporary of Dr. Schussler’s who assists the good doctor with feelings of her own unearthed during her sessions with the patient—feelings of guilt regarding her own German heritage and her Nazi father.
By Blood is divided into four sections, each with its own identifiable focus: Part One is backstory and setting, wherein the professor’s educated façade is quickly stripped to its psychologically disturbed underwire; Part Two is the scheme, the research that will unearth the patient’s previously unknown life story; Part Three is the history lesson, detailing in tremendous detail the patient’s search for truth as she tracks down her birth mother Michal and pulls from her the sordid details of her birth and subsequent abandonment; and Part Four is a trim collection of pages set aside for final revelations and unfortunately timed reveals. For the first two parts, the professor is most certainly the novel’s focus—much to his own dismay. In Part Three, the story shifts and the professor becomes a full-time observer to the patient’s long and difficult history. While this is in large part due to leg work accomplished in secret by the professor, he mostly recedes into the background in this part, content to sit back and munch his metaphorical popcorn while the patient pours out so much of her life as to entirely shield us from inquiring about his. In this sense, the narrative—and how it is written—conforms to his ever-present need to hide from reality and the ramifications and full acknowledgement of his unfortunate past actions.
Masks are the theme of the day. The patient’s story is the professor’s mask, so that he may hide from the world (and live somewhat happily in another’s as an imagined silent partner). By a similar token, Jewishness and lesbianism are the masks of mothers. Michal did not want religion to be a burden for her daughter as it was for her, claiming it is not blood but choice that defines someone as Jewish. This is comparable, in a sense, to the patient’s adoptive mother and her views on lesbianism—as something her daughter has chosen to inflict upon their totally happy, well balanced, and not at all cultish or borderline alcoholic family. Stories and choices—or what are perceived as choices—are preferred over blood by those most fearful of what is represented by what’s in their DNA. The book’s title, in the end, holds to what the professor, Dr. Schussler, and Michal most desperately want to ignore, and what the patient seeks so ardently to confirm: that the failures and successes of their minds and hearts are tethered to who they are, who they were, and they always would be, and the choices made along the way are worth only so much.
All that being said, the ending of By Blood is frustratingly abrupt—not so much because the patient’s history and happiness remain unresolved, but because the professor, whose life has as previously mentioned taken a back seat in the novel’s second half, has been shut out of the life he’d been obsessing over, but with little in the way of ramifications to his own already damaged psyche. This is at odds with how troubled he seemed previously over the mere possibility of losing that connection when the landlord threatened to move his office to another floor. Additionally, the professor’s own story is left unceremoniously unresolved, with his academic and professional future still up in the air at the end of the novel. It feels a little as if the author lost interest in both halves of the story at once, and the professor is left at the end with having to once more live with and examine his own life. However, the fear we’d been led to expect from him in such a situation is not present in the novel’s final pages, leading the reader to suspect that by accomplishing what he had with the patient—whatever the end result to his ethics or moral grounding—he’d found some sort of self-satisfaction that would in turn carry him through to the better, more emotionally well developed self that is shown in the novel’s opening pages, as he addresses the reader from a point after the narrative’s end.
And like life, nothing is ever truly over, and no one’s life is ever so honest and clear. Despite a few minor and not-so-minor unresolved thoughts regarding the novel’s final few pages, Ullman’s By Blood remains captivating ’til the very last.
I don’t understand! How could they get me from a place they hate? How could they? I know it sounds crazy, but I feel I’m tainted. That Father looks at me and sees this mark: Catholic.
But you are not changed, said the therapist. Your being, your self, is the same, whether you came from a reed basket, a Protestant church, or a Catholic agency.
This has nothing to do with who I am! shouted the patient. It’s a mark on me before I was anyone. No matter what I am!
She was breathing forcefully, and I thought she would finally cry. But she contained herself and fell silent.
***
By Blood, Ellen Ullman’s second novel and third book, is a strange, often unsettling bit of literary voyeurism. The protagonist of this sordid tale is an unnamed fifty-year-old disgraced university professor awaiting the judgement of the Professional Ethics Committee. It’s never directly spelled out what his disgrace was, only that it was sexual in nature and involved a young male student—the details of their encounter are, to the novel’s benefit, kept decidedly vague. In an effort to keep his career from falling apart entirely, and to better occupy his mind, he leases an office space in a building shared by a therapist in San Francisco in the late summer of 1974 to prepare a series of lectures on The Eumenides.
However, in place of his work the narrator instead finds himself captivated, almost immediately, by the therapy sessions of a young lesbian attempting to unravel her past and track down her birth parents. The young unnamed woman’s sessions travel with almost perfect audio clarity between the walls separating her therapist’s walls from the Spartan office of our unbalanced and progressively more disturbing narrator. As the professor becomes more interested—and more involved in the patient’s story, he gradually inserts himself into the tale. At first his interest is merely a curiosity, but curiosity quickly leads to almost telegraphed obsession, then to an unnatural sort of fatherly protection and mistrust of Dr. Dora Schussler, the therapist, as he turns the patient’s search for self-identification into an academic project, in the end assuming only he knows what is best for the young wayward.
Set amidst the Zodiac killings of the mid-seventies, By Blood is a highly crafted literary mystery. The professor narrating the novel’s events is at first presented as an arrogant, entitled man. Through practiced attentiveness and an overeager imagination, he is able to construct a fully three-dimensional image of the patient’s therapy sessions—using details such as the smell of a particular brand of cigarette smoked by Dr. Schussler, or the sound she makes when she rubs her nylons together as the paint he applies to the setting built in his mind. The professor’s incredible ability to take individual details and run with them affords him a distraction from his own life and problems; periodic memories and half-crystalized thoughts reveal only what’s needed from a man whose family life was marked by “long bloodlines of mad people stretching back in time, suicides running in our veins the way blue eyes were passed down in saner clans.” It isn’t long before his many-layered neurosis overwhelms his manicured, erudite self, and the personality the reader is forced to hold hands with for the novel’s duration is one unhinged and ignorant to such ideas as “privacy” and “professional conduct.”
Opposite to the professor is the object of his fascination: the patient. Her life, as we learn through the professor’s aural voyeurism, is uncertain; she does not know entirely what she wants in a lover, how best to navigate the waters of her lesbianism with less than supportive parents, or the truth of her origins. Her adoptive mother is an emotional black hole, speaks often in the future imperative (a fantastically passive aggressive approach to parenting), and refuses to accept her daughter’s sexuality; her adoptive father is a man disowned by his own cult leader of a father and harbours a deep and at first glance irrational hatred of Catholics. We learn that, through the professor’s unknown-to-others intervention, the patient was abandoned during World War II by a Jewish mother who had married an Aryan man. She did so to attempt to protect herself from Hitler’s concentration camps. The patient was at first adopted by her adoptive father’s father, Grandfather Avery, who in turn rejected her (he’d been under the impression, vicious as despicable as he was, that he’d adopted a pure-blooded Aryan child and not some Jewish girl who’d simply been baptized Catholic). The patient’s story is so attractive to the professor as he sees, forced or not, fragments of his own self in her: “How like me she was, I thought: never properly loved, not trusting therefore, believing only in the picture of the world constructed by her analyzing mind.”
Set firmly (and unknowingly) between the professor and the patient is the therapist: Dr. Dora Schussler. Dr. Schussler is the only named character of the three main; she is the story’s fulcrum and, eventually, its final curtain. Dr. Schussler, without knowing it, is the professor’s primary antagonist—a therapist he assumes at times to be less than competent, unworthy of the patient’s attention and respect. He listens carefully to supposedly private conversations shared between Dr. Schussler and an always outside-of-the-scene therapist named Dr. Gurevitch, a contemporary of Dr. Schussler’s who assists the good doctor with feelings of her own unearthed during her sessions with the patient—feelings of guilt regarding her own German heritage and her Nazi father.
By Blood is divided into four sections, each with its own identifiable focus: Part One is backstory and setting, wherein the professor’s educated façade is quickly stripped to its psychologically disturbed underwire; Part Two is the scheme, the research that will unearth the patient’s previously unknown life story; Part Three is the history lesson, detailing in tremendous detail the patient’s search for truth as she tracks down her birth mother Michal and pulls from her the sordid details of her birth and subsequent abandonment; and Part Four is a trim collection of pages set aside for final revelations and unfortunately timed reveals. For the first two parts, the professor is most certainly the novel’s focus—much to his own dismay. In Part Three, the story shifts and the professor becomes a full-time observer to the patient’s long and difficult history. While this is in large part due to leg work accomplished in secret by the professor, he mostly recedes into the background in this part, content to sit back and munch his metaphorical popcorn while the patient pours out so much of her life as to entirely shield us from inquiring about his. In this sense, the narrative—and how it is written—conforms to his ever-present need to hide from reality and the ramifications and full acknowledgement of his unfortunate past actions.
Masks are the theme of the day. The patient’s story is the professor’s mask, so that he may hide from the world (and live somewhat happily in another’s as an imagined silent partner). By a similar token, Jewishness and lesbianism are the masks of mothers. Michal did not want religion to be a burden for her daughter as it was for her, claiming it is not blood but choice that defines someone as Jewish. This is comparable, in a sense, to the patient’s adoptive mother and her views on lesbianism—as something her daughter has chosen to inflict upon their totally happy, well balanced, and not at all cultish or borderline alcoholic family. Stories and choices—or what are perceived as choices—are preferred over blood by those most fearful of what is represented by what’s in their DNA. The book’s title, in the end, holds to what the professor, Dr. Schussler, and Michal most desperately want to ignore, and what the patient seeks so ardently to confirm: that the failures and successes of their minds and hearts are tethered to who they are, who they were, and they always would be, and the choices made along the way are worth only so much.
All that being said, the ending of By Blood is frustratingly abrupt—not so much because the patient’s history and happiness remain unresolved, but because the professor, whose life has as previously mentioned taken a back seat in the novel’s second half, has been shut out of the life he’d been obsessing over, but with little in the way of ramifications to his own already damaged psyche. This is at odds with how troubled he seemed previously over the mere possibility of losing that connection when the landlord threatened to move his office to another floor. Additionally, the professor’s own story is left unceremoniously unresolved, with his academic and professional future still up in the air at the end of the novel. It feels a little as if the author lost interest in both halves of the story at once, and the professor is left at the end with having to once more live with and examine his own life. However, the fear we’d been led to expect from him in such a situation is not present in the novel’s final pages, leading the reader to suspect that by accomplishing what he had with the patient—whatever the end result to his ethics or moral grounding—he’d found some sort of self-satisfaction that would in turn carry him through to the better, more emotionally well developed self that is shown in the novel’s opening pages, as he addresses the reader from a point after the narrative’s end.
And like life, nothing is ever truly over, and no one’s life is ever so honest and clear. Despite a few minor and not-so-minor unresolved thoughts regarding the novel’s final few pages, Ullman’s By Blood remains captivating ’til the very last.
December 30, 2018
The opening of the book is superb. Let's walk through WHY it's so superb.
"I did not cause her any harm. This was a great victory for me. At the end of it, I was a changed man. I am indebted to her; it was she who changed me, although I never learned her name."
Reason #1:
It's fascinating, isn't it? How on earth did a person whose name he ever knew have such an effect on him? And what on earth is wrong with him? Why was he so tempted to cause her harm (or is it that he views himself as so twisted that even an interaction with him would inflict psychological harm?) that it's a great victory NOT to? God, he's creepy! And yet there's something faintly sweet about the delivery. If his priority was not to harm her, then presumably if she changed him it must be for the better.
So many questions after so few words.
Reason #2:
Soon - on page 9 - we encounter her. He overhears her session with her therapist, who occupies an adjacent office to one he has just leased. A white-noise machine obscures all other sessions but those with 'my dear patient', as he sometimes refers to her in his narration, and almost all his thoughts centre on her and the need to listen in on all her sessions.
Aren't you skipping ahead, Eleanor? What does this have to do with the beginning?
Here's why! Because without that opening, we might as readers spend half the book awaiting his violent collapse into the role of murderer, or rapist, or kidnapper. It would overshadow the reading experience and obscure the true progression of story.
Reason #3:
The mirror of #2. We might also spend half the book awaiting a saccharine encounter where, even though he's deeply disturbed, on furlough from his university job while he's being investigated for inappropriate behaviour, he meets 'my dear patient' and they become best of friends. Yes, we'd be spared the prospect that they might fall in love, since the first session the narrator overhears makes it clear that she's a lesbian, but a platonic fulfilment would be far too neat and saccharine nonetheless.
But with the opening, we know that he never learned her name.
No matter what kind of impact he's managed to have on her life - and yes, we will discover in the course of the book that he did manage this - it's clearly shadowy, anonymous and either beneficial or neutral in nature.
The briefest plot description I could give (listening in, obsession, etc.) is illuminated and limited by that opener.
Moving on. I had forgotten about this book. I received an ARC of it one Christmas and could not put it down, finding the same urgency that the narrator does, the narrator who must wait days - days! Sometimes whole holiday periods! - before catching up with 'my dear patient'. We the readers are spared some of that, but the urgency remains within us. A neat trick is the use of very, very short chapters, often ending with Dr Dora Schussler, the therapist, saying 'Our time is up' or similar. Never enough. Never enough.
I was lucky enough to have almost completely forgotten the plot of the book, although I had not forgotten its murky excited atmosphere. I recaptured much of the feeling I had on the first reading.
Much of the plot I can't give away, but I'll say: Most of it is driven by the patient's experiences, and not the narrator's. We learn it all second- (third-?) hand. In the first therapy session the narrator overhears, she talks about her lesbianism, her job as a financial analyst, and her adoption, but it's the adoption and its background that is the focus of her discoveries and journey.
I'd forgotten what a real ten out of ten was. I even went back and changed my last review, from a 5 to a 4 after re-reading this. That book stayed in my thoughts and I was compelled to re-read some sections, but on grading it I gave it an initial 5 because I thought, "What's it actually lacking?" But for this book, I thought, "What could possibly improve it?"
"I did not cause her any harm. This was a great victory for me. At the end of it, I was a changed man. I am indebted to her; it was she who changed me, although I never learned her name."
Reason #1:
It's fascinating, isn't it? How on earth did a person whose name he ever knew have such an effect on him? And what on earth is wrong with him? Why was he so tempted to cause her harm (or is it that he views himself as so twisted that even an interaction with him would inflict psychological harm?) that it's a great victory NOT to? God, he's creepy! And yet there's something faintly sweet about the delivery. If his priority was not to harm her, then presumably if she changed him it must be for the better.
So many questions after so few words.
Reason #2:
Soon - on page 9 - we encounter her. He overhears her session with her therapist, who occupies an adjacent office to one he has just leased. A white-noise machine obscures all other sessions but those with 'my dear patient', as he sometimes refers to her in his narration, and almost all his thoughts centre on her and the need to listen in on all her sessions.
Aren't you skipping ahead, Eleanor? What does this have to do with the beginning?
Here's why! Because without that opening, we might as readers spend half the book awaiting his violent collapse into the role of murderer, or rapist, or kidnapper. It would overshadow the reading experience and obscure the true progression of story.
Reason #3:
The mirror of #2. We might also spend half the book awaiting a saccharine encounter where, even though he's deeply disturbed, on furlough from his university job while he's being investigated for inappropriate behaviour, he meets 'my dear patient' and they become best of friends. Yes, we'd be spared the prospect that they might fall in love, since the first session the narrator overhears makes it clear that she's a lesbian, but a platonic fulfilment would be far too neat and saccharine nonetheless.
But with the opening, we know that he never learned her name.
No matter what kind of impact he's managed to have on her life - and yes, we will discover in the course of the book that he did manage this - it's clearly shadowy, anonymous and either beneficial or neutral in nature.
The briefest plot description I could give (listening in, obsession, etc.) is illuminated and limited by that opener.
Moving on. I had forgotten about this book. I received an ARC of it one Christmas and could not put it down, finding the same urgency that the narrator does, the narrator who must wait days - days! Sometimes whole holiday periods! - before catching up with 'my dear patient'. We the readers are spared some of that, but the urgency remains within us. A neat trick is the use of very, very short chapters, often ending with Dr Dora Schussler, the therapist, saying 'Our time is up' or similar. Never enough. Never enough.
I was lucky enough to have almost completely forgotten the plot of the book, although I had not forgotten its murky excited atmosphere. I recaptured much of the feeling I had on the first reading.
Much of the plot I can't give away, but I'll say: Most of it is driven by the patient's experiences, and not the narrator's. We learn it all second- (third-?) hand. In the first therapy session the narrator overhears, she talks about her lesbianism, her job as a financial analyst, and her adoption, but it's the adoption and its background that is the focus of her discoveries and journey.
I'd forgotten what a real ten out of ten was. I even went back and changed my last review, from a 5 to a 4 after re-reading this. That book stayed in my thoughts and I was compelled to re-read some sections, but on grading it I gave it an initial 5 because I thought, "What's it actually lacking?" But for this book, I thought, "What could possibly improve it?"
February 11, 2022
This book combined several things that I'm very interested in: generational identity, 1970's San Francisco after the spirit of love and utopianism faded, the fate of Jewish refugees after the Holocaust, and Israel. I could've done without the narrator, but ultimately didn't need him. I'm not one who needs sympathetic characters to identify with. The abrupt ending of chapters and language that wouldn't have been used in the seventies (such as PC) are minor qualms. Overall I really enjoyed this book.
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