In Alice & Oliver, Charles Bock (Beautiful Children) draws on the experience of his late wife's battle with leukemia to create an intensely realistic and harrowing portrayal of a young woman's desperate fight for life against a relentless disease.
On the way from her New York City home to an idyllic family Thanksgiving in Vermont in 1993, with her husband, Oliver, and infant daughter, Doe, fashion designer Alice Culvert nearly succumbs to a pneumonia-like illness. After serious but less dire conditions are ruled out, a diagnosis of acute myeloid leukemia follows and the family embarks on what one of Alice's doctors calls the "marathon of sprints" that will be their reality for the next year.
But Bock's novel is more than a chronicle of cancer's ravages and the battle against it. Oliver is a software developer who is racing to finish a word-processing program he hopes will save his fledgling company. A rationalist who's skeptical of Alice's exploration of Eastern religion and her resort to alternative therapies as an adjunct to conventional treatment, he makes a foolhardy choice that threatens to undermine his marriage. This depiction of a relationship in crisis is every bit as taut and unpredictable as the medical drama in the novel's foreground.
In this vivid novel, Charles Bock takes readers on a journey that never moves far beyond the confines of an Upper East Side hospital and a loft in the Meatpacking District, and yet it encompasses a world. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer