Walking Distance

by Marian Thurm

Laura's peaceful life is shattered when she questions how to balance the conflicting demands of her husband and family and her love for David, a dying cancer victim

Genres: Fiction

28 pages, Paperback

First published March 12, 1987

Reviews

[Kelly · Rating 1 out of 5]

I wasn't surprised to see that the author of Walking Distance had published in The New Yorker because there was something bloodless and emotionally distant about the novel that seems common to New Yorker short stories. The novel is about a happily married housewife who begins an affair with a dying man, which sounds like a fantastic premise. But the characters aren't very unique or real and there is a completely pointless subplot about the wife's grandmother that never really relates back to the main story. The wife gets pregnant and I felt like it would have been a much more interesting choice to have the baby be the lover's or for her not to know who the father was, but instead she gets pregnant right before the affair. So her being pregnant while the lover is dying is more of a "circle of life", straight out of The Lion King symbol. My other major, major peeve about the novel is that you don't practically beat us over the head with the fact that one of the main characters is dying and then end the book before he actually kicks the bucket.