EXIT HERE!!!!Let me start off by saying that I never met a Douglas Kennedy book that I didn't love!! This book had arrived a few days ago (ordered from Amazon UK because it came out there first) and, each time I passed the table where it was sitting, I actually got a tingle just seeing the name Douglas Kennedy on the cover and knowing that something great was between those covers.
I like to think I discovered Douglas Kennedy all on my own many, many years ago when I read The Big Picture. At that time, whenever anyone asked me to recommend a great book, that's the one I told them to read. Kennedy followed up The Big Picture with The Job....another great roller coaster ride of a book. I don't know if something changed in his life at that point because all of the following books were very different. They were specifically about women or couples who were going through major rifts in their lives. As far as I'm concerned, no one can get inside of the head of a woman like Douglas Kennedy can. I wouldn't want to be his wife.
Kennedy writes that "All novels are about a crisis and how an individual -- or a set of individuals --negotiates said crises." In Leaving The World, the main character Joan Howard lives in the world of academia having gotten her PhD from Harvard and is now working as a professor at a New England college. I think Kennedy makes her so intellectually superior so that some of the things she does end up making her look more than intellectually challenged. Obviously doomed by her impulses, Jane finds herself mixed up in one predicament after another. It's how she deals with her crises that gives this book the depth that Kennedy's readers know he will deliver. She cannot stick to anything or anyone and finds herself lost in a world of people who continually leave her.
Until one day she decides that she will leave them. This is where Kennedy shines as he now puts Jane in charge of her own life and her own destiny and where we see shades of the excitement found in The Big Picture seeping through each page. While some people might say this book starts out slowly, they would be right because this is the way Kennedy sets the stage for things to come. He wants his reader to be totally invested in his character before he asks them to understand her. When we first meet Jane, it is in the present moment but, like everyone else, she has a back story and it's the understanding of this back story that will eventually help the reader to understand why she does what she does. In the book Kennedy says, "Life can only be lived forwards and understood backwards." And so we really come to understand more and more what is propelling Jane. There are times in the book where I was screaming, "NO Jane...don't do it", only to have my words fall on deaf ears.
Jane's life is one of ups and downs never seeming to find that happy medium between living and actually being happy doing so. Kennedy says in the book, "Unhappiness isn't simply a state of mind; it is also a habit." Reading this book is a journey as Jane tries to break this habit. It's another examination of the psyche of a woman by a master storyteller. In the hands of Douglas Kennedy, it becomes an expedition and one I was happy to take.
I know I've quoted Kennedy a lot in this review but some of the things he says in this book had such meaning to me. I leave you with one of the best...."Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that somebody might be looking." Well, I'm now your conscience looking at you and watching to see if you read this book!!!
My Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5 stars
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