Alice In Bed Author:Cathleen Schine The good looking, deceptively bouyant girl in bed is Alice Brody, untio now a sophomore at Sarah Lawrence and currently immobilized (it's been weeks, soon months) in a hospital bed in New AYork. Her legs won't moe (the pain coming in "hot waves, like acute embarrassment"). She's in traction. Dr. Witherspoons (famous attending physician to famous... more » football teams) can't find cause or cure...
In this wryly comic and exhilarating first novel, Cathleen Schine gives us a young, sassy, appealing girl suddenly struck down and fighting back; the year she spends recovering; and the odd, crowded life that buzzes around her: Her parents divorcing (her father apologetically off to Vancouver to a new bride, a new life)... her mother, well meaning and well appointed (except for her new-found beau, who wears a diamond pinky ring), suddenly by herself, representing Family, sitting with Alice, every day, all day (starting and abandoning endless needlepoints), comforting and irritating her daughter... the specialists flown in for consultation, patronizing and prodding her... her nurses fussing and two doctor-lovers hovering around her.
Alice on the surface involved and touched, even amused, participating in the life of her family, her fellow patients, her nurses, her doctor-lovers, yet all the while instinctively focusing every ounce of her real strength on the recovery of her freedom, the recapturing of what she once took for granted: motion.