Ullman does a great job of spinning up the San Francisco of the '70s and manages to adroitly juggle a pretty dense narrative (the main character is a professor eavesdropping on a therapy session where a young woman describes to her therapist conversations, interactions, thoughts, etc. that she's had, mostly dealing with her being adopted). Ultimately, the density of the book feels like its undoing though -- the abrupt ending doesn't feel earned and just feels like a ton of plot threads are cut straight off rather than at least being sort of tied off. Good, but just short of great. ( )

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. ( )

The basic story is good; it could have been said with far fewer words. I'm not too interested in reading a full page description of a foggy day in San Francisco.

The narrator is a professor on suspension/leave. He rents an office, which turns out to be next to a therapist. He can hear and makes a point to eavesdrop on one particular client every week. [Creepy] She is adopted and has a continual identity crisis. He tracks her birth mother from a concentration/displaced persons camp in Germany to Israel and manages to supply this information to the patient. She goes to Israel to meet her birth mother and learn her story. ( )

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' [b:Fatelessness|318335|Fatelessness|Imre Kertész|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1348898439s/318335.jpg|309125], 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. ( )

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. ( )