Under the Influence

Probably closer to a 4.5 stars
From the beginning of this tightly plotted story there's an impending sense of doom. The book starts off when Helen glimpses Ava in the back of a taxi. Ava is an old friend that she hasn't seen in years and the sighting sends her down memory lane to the events that led to the end of their friendship.

Helen was a lost soul when she met Ava. She was badly parented, divorced, and had recently lost custody of her young son. Ava and Swift are wealthy philanthropists who take an interest in Helen and soon she's under their spell. Under their influence. She had never been part of a loving family and when she met Ava, the promise of love, acceptance, and support, along with their lavish lifestyle, was difficult to show more resist.

There were moments I wanted to reach through the pages and shake some sense into Helen. It's so easy to judge flawed, vulnerable people if you haven't walked in their shoes, but I felt nothing but sympathy for her. It's a complicated story that makes you think long and hard about serious topics.

The ending.....well, I was holding my breath, and while it ended suddenly, I wrote the ending I wanted in my mind :)

Maynard has quickly become one of my favorite authors. Her writing is deceptively simple yet filled with nuance and depth - the mark of a great author. This was my second book by her and it won't be my last. show less

Have you ever met someone who was completely seductive? I don't mean that in a sexual way either. There are some people in this world who draw you in, sometimes positively but just as often negatively. They have a charisma that convinces you that you've discovered a gem in them, a new immediate best friend, someone you want to spend as much time as possible with, someone who makes you feel special and valued. I have met a few people like this in my life and there's nothing like the feeling of being taken into their inner ring. But sometimes occupying that space comes with a cost you couldn't predict in the first flush of enraptured friendship. Joyce Maynard's most recent novel, Under the Influence, details not only the spellbinding show more relationship but also what happens when a character opens her eyes to the actual people by whom she is so enchanted.

Helen's drinking destroyed the life she'd built for herself. It lost her custody of her son, the only bright spot she has in an otherwise lonely life. Devastated by losing Ollie, Helen works on improving herself in hopes that she'll eventually get her boy back. She attends AA faithfully and has stayed sober for years. She works as a school portrait photographer and moonlights as a server for a catering company. She goes on occasional dates from Match.com but there's no one special in her life. She's got one friend who she counts on every now and then but she's mainly alone, her father having never been in her life and her mother being an indifferent and unmaternal alcoholic herself. When Helen meets a lovely woman named Ava Havilland at an art benefit where Helen is a server and Ava is buying art, Helen is completely enchanted. Telling Ava that she herself is a photographer, even if she hasn't shot anything but school pictures in forever, the two strike up the beginnings of an almost obsessive (on Helen's part) friendship. Helen becomes a frequent visitor to the Havilland home and feels as if she is almost a member of the family, adopted by this captivating woman and her magnetic and charismatic husband, Swift. She starts to do them small favors as friends do for each other and they in turn enfold her into their fabulously, wealthy wonderland life.

Helen shares the heartbreaks of her life with Ava even though she gets little similar information in return. She is dazzled by the Havillands and the near perfection of their life. Just about the time Helen meets a quiet, loyal, and unassuming man named Elliott, she is given some expanded access to Ollie by her ex-husband and she folds her son easily into her life with Ava and Swift. Eight year old Ollie is as enchanted by them as she is, maybe even more so. Elliott, on the other hand, is not so taken with them. In fact, as an accountant he is really only curious about the new nonprofit called BARK they are creating to spay and neuter pets all over the country. The Havillands don't take to Elliott either, dubbing him a bean counter and damning him with faint praise. Helen is torn, especially when her best chance of regaining custody of Ollie might be with support from Swift and Ava.

Told from the perspective of years after the fact and narrated by a more self-aware Helen, it is immediately obvious that something has caused a rift between Helen and the Havillands but it takes most of the novel to find out just what that is. There are occasional interjections by present day Helen into her narration of the unfolding past that offer a hint at her feelings now and what she feels she should have recognized back then. These interjections serve to keep the reader alert to the undercurrents swirling through the narration and elevate the narrative tension quite effectively. Maynard has drawn Helen very convincingly as a woman who craves validation from others and is vulnerable in this need. Helen's own story-telling abilities don't protect her from falling under the influence of others and in fact make her inability to see people as they truly are sad. Helen is truly under the influence, first of alcohol and then, more importantly, of the power and allure of the Havillands. Used to having her life dictated to her by others, she fails to see the real place she occupies in the Havilland solar system and it will take a truly shocking incident to open her eyes. This said, she herself is not an entirely likable character, making terrible choices and allowing herself to be blinded the way she is. Swift and Ava are glittering, brittle characters whose kindnesses are undercut by something a little sinister, a little condescending, a little disturbing. And so the story is brilliantly set. The novel is both an indictment of the moneyed who wield their bank books as weapons and a look at the power of finally directing your own life and having the courage to rescue yourself. It is well written and suspenseful and the reader will fall under its spell just as truly as Helen fell under Swift and Ava's. show less

Under the Influence by Joyce Maynard is a very highly recommended novel about a woman desperate for family.

Helen is a photographer who works as a school portrait photographer. She lives for her son, Ollie and the weekends she gets to see him - if it all works out with her ex. Helen lost custody of Ollie three years ago after she was arrested for a DUI. She can tell Ollie is drifting away from her and yet she feels powerless to do anything about it. Since the DUI, she's been sober, but her ex won't believe it.

When Helen is working as a server for a catered gallery event one night, she meets Ava and Swift Havilland. Ava immediately takes Helen under her wing and befriends her. Ava and Swift are incredibly wealthy. Currently they have show more started a charity devoted to rescuing dogs. Ava is wheelchair bound, but she still seems bigger than life. Once Helen starts seeing Ava regularly and helping her, she becomes more and more enmeshed with their lives and their inner circle of friends.

When Ollie, 7 years old, actually gets to spend a weekend with Helen, she takes him over to their house and introduces him to Ava and Swift. Ollie is immediately entranced by Swift, who teaches him to swim in their pool and becomes a larger-than-life male role model in his young life. It seems that their life has done nothing but improve with Ava and Swift.

Helen muses in the opening "There had been a time when a day didn’t go by that I didn’t hear her voice. Nearly everything I did was directly inspired by what Ava told me, or didn’t even have to tell me, because I knew already what Ava would think, and whatever that was, that’s what I believed, too. (Then came a long, dark time after she cut me out of her world, and the hard reality of that betrayal became—second only to losing custody of my son—the defining fact of my life.) Losing Ava’s friendship had left me unable to remember who I might be anymore without her. As strong a force as her presence had created, her absence was stronger yet."

So, we know right from the start that something is going to go terribly wrong with this friendship, but it takes the whole book to reveal what happened. I was totally engrossed in this story from start to finish, speculating what was going to happen to cause the total loss of this friendship. Helen is exceptionally needy; she desperately wants the closeness of a family and Ava and Swift are fulfilling that role for her. But the question at the back of my mind while reading Under the Influence was: "What are Ava and Swift getting from this friendship and all their generosity? Can anyone be this altruistic?"

Yes, they are both very egocentric, but Helen seems to just to see their good point. Even when she meets a great guy, they discourage her relationship with him because he's best described as just nice and boring. Helen really likes him, but they discourage her relationship with anyone but them. I found this novel captivating as it explored what lengths people will go to to control others and demand exclusivity in friendships as their due while they protect their self-interests.
Maynard is an incredibly talented writer. The slow unfolding of the complete story is well-paced. You know right from the start that something is going to happen and that alone will keep you reading as more and more is revealed. You will be guessing and second guessing what is going to happen. The character of Helen is wonderfully developed and written as if she is a real person, with flaws and shortcomings. Helen is not perfect, but you will know that she loves Ollie more than anything else.

Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of HarperCollins for review purposes.

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Helen has already made one catastrophic mistake in her life, driving her sick son to the hospital while intoxicated. This resulted in losing custody of her son. Just when she thinks all is lost, she connects to a wealthy couple that offers her friendship and an entrée to a world she's only seen in magazines, television, and movies in Under the Influence by Joyce Maynard.

As a child, Helen created a variety of scenarios to explain away her dysfunctional life including telling the mother of a classmate that Audrey Hepburn was her grandmother. As an adult, Helen thought her life was set when she married. She was quite happy with her husband, child, and in-laws until her husband came home to report that he was in love with someone new. show more Facing not just the loss of her husband but the loss of her "family," she begins to drown her sorrows in alcohol. After losing custody of her son, she joins AA and begins her new life of sobriety. While catering an art show, she meets Ava Havilland and is quickly befriended. Before you know it, she's spending time with Ava and her husband Swift at their home at all hours of the day and night. It is because of their largesse that Helen is finally able to spend time with her son, albeit after he's spent time swimming with Swift and playing with Ava and Swift's dogs. When her fiancé, Elliott, begins to question their motives and financial acumen, Helen refuses to listen and even begins to pull away from the one person that truly seems to care for nothing more than her happiness and well-being. When tragedy strikes, Helen's rose-colored glasses are raised and she begins to question whether friendship should ever come with provisos and stipulations?

I found Under the Influence to be a captivating read. When I first read that the main character was a recovering alcoholic, I thought the title referred to drinking issues. The more I read the more I realized that Helen was under the influence of something more intoxicating (for her at least), friendship and the thought of being a part of something akin to a family. Ava and Swift are well-thought of and engaging people, but it is easy to see that are also highly skilled at manipulation and using whatever advantage they can to get what they want done. For lack of a better word, they are bullies, emotional bullies but bullies nonetheless. Helen isn't a sad or pathetic person she's just someone that craves friendship and a family. She had that once, lost it, and is struggling to rationalize staying with her new "family" for as long as possible. Her relationship with Elliott was happy and fulfilling but sabotaged by Ava and Swift's constant belittling of Elliott's profession and his seemingly boring demeanor. Ms. Maynard has adeptly captured the toxic nature of some friendships and the devastating results wrought by them with Under the Influence. I liked Helen and felt sympathetic toward her and her situation. I empathized with Elliott and his attempts to be there for Helen and get her to see the true nature of her relationship with the Havillands. And I felt downright sorry that Ollie, Helen's son was caught up in all the high drama. This was the first book I've read by Ms. Maynard, but I doubt if it will be my last (I've put her previous titles on my TBR list and am looking forward to reading them all). If you enjoy reading about relationships—the good, the bad, and the ugly—then you'll definitely want to read Under the Influence. I strongly suggest you wait until the weekend to start reading this book, because once you start you won't want to put it down. show less

Joyce Maynard's fantastic novel Under the Influence is one of those books that grabs your attention right from the beginning and never lets go. It doesn't start flashy, with a grisly murder or great drama, rather we learn that protagonist is moving to a new town with her son when she sees a woman she hasn't seen in ten years.

Maynard takes the rest of the novel to share why Helen hasn't seen Ava in ten years and tells us the story of how they came to be friends. Helen was thirty-eight, divorced from her husband and trying to raise her three-year-old son on her own. She had no family to speak of, and she adored her husband's family who took her in and loved her, and then threw her out when her husband left her for another woman.

Helen show more turned to alcohol and when she was frantically driving her son to the hospital with a burst appendix after she had been drinking, the police stopped her and she watched helplessly as her son was taken away in an ambulance while she was taken away in handcuffs.

She lost her license and then she lost her son to her ex-husband. She had visitation twice a month for six hours and felt that her life was over. Then she met Ava and Swift, a wealthy couple who made her feel like she was worthy again.

Ava was confined to a wheelchair and her husband Swift was a larger-than-life bear of a man, a self-made millionaire who lived life to the fullest. They took Helen in under their wing, inviting her out to dinners, bringing her into their home, and eventually hiring her as a photographer.

Helen blossomed with Ava and Swift, and soon her young son Ollie, now eight, was brought into this makeshift family. Ollie was mesmerized by Swift, who acted like a child himself- all id, no superego.

Helen also began dating Elliot, an accountant she met through online dating. Elliot was the anti-Swift. He was not flashy, boring even, but Helen and Elliot liked the same things- staying in and watching old movies, trying new restaurants.

Ava and Swift did not approve of Elliot; they told Helen he was a dud and not good enough for her. Ollie didn't like Elliot either; he wasn't as exciting or cool as Swift.

The title refers not only to Helen's DUI conviction but to the way in which Helen fell under the influence of this golden couple, two people who picked her up when she was at her low point. Why couldn't Elliot understand that?

Maynard reveals these characters so slowly and brilliantly, they feel very real. Helen's anguish, loneliness and humiliation at losing her son, the only light in her life, is so visceral, you can feel it vibrate on the page.

Her imagery is vivid too, such as her description of Helen's childhood with a mother who didn't love or want her:
"I remember a great many bologna sandwiches and granola bars. A Top 40 station playing seventies hits, and the television always on. Old lottery tickets piled on the counter, never the winning number. The smell of marijuana and spilled wine. Stacks of library books under the covers of my bed: the thing that saved me."

The story has a sense of foreboding throughout. We know that something happened to destroy Ava and Helen's friendship, we are waiting for it to be revealed.

At the end of the book, the Author's Notes share that Elliot (my favorite character) is based on Maynard's husband and it made me wish that everyone had an Elliot in their life as Maynard and Helen did.

I read Under the Influence in a few hours, I truly did not want to put it down. It is a book that I will recommend and ponder and know that my thoughts will return to many times in the future. I will not forget Helen and how she loved her son with a ferociousness most mothers have in them. I give it my highest recommendation. show less

From the beginning this novel has an insidious tone of a disaster waiting to happen. Well written with a beguiling and mixed cast of characters, they represent many of the people we meet in our actual lives. A young mother who loses custody of her son and is struggling emotionally and financially. A wealthy couple who offer her friendship and support. A young boy trying to find his way between two homes and a man who wants to be part of Helen's life but is stymied by her new friendship.

What is the true cost of friendship? How much are we willing to pay? From the beginning we are aware that something drastic and life changing happens at novel's end. Extremely well written, tightly plotted, I often felt like a fly on the wall observing show more someone's intimate life. We do get in close and personal with these characters and while I can't say I liked them, well except for Ollie and Elliot, they were so interesting and I really wanted to see where this was going. Many times I felt like shaking Helen and telling her to wake up. A book to get caught up in, an immersive read that dully engaged my emotions. I just love this author's work and how good she is at portraying life's trials and joys, people and their misfortunes.

ARC from publisher. show less

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

One of the things that I'm working on in my personal life this year is to better acknowledge and cultivate my capacity for empathy; for those who don't know, that's not when you feel sorry for someone (that's instead sympathy), but when you try to imagine what it must be like to actually be that person, to walk that proverbial mile in their shoes, which in the best cases leads to a profound new understanding of and connection to that person in question, and thus is of better help to that struggling person than any feeling sorry for them could be.

I show more was thinking of all this a lot this week while reading through popular author Joyce Maynard's newest novel, Under the Influence, because I have to admit that it's one of those books that I have an only so-so relationship with (a delicate and slow-moving character study by an academic veteran), concerning the kind of female protagonist who often drives me crazy. A mousy suburban middle-classer out in nondescript California, our hero Helen also has a drinking problem, not exactly a terrible one and a habit she already has under control by the time our particular story begins; but it was enough that when she once had to drive her injured little son to the hospital one night years ago when actively drunk, then got caught by the police doing so, her domineering ex-husband was able to show enough of a pattern of her habitual drinking to get her custody of the boy completely taken away from her. And so our story, taking place several years later, is just basically a plot-light look at what her life is like in this post-DUI time, where she does all those self-righteous things that mousy middle-class suburban women do that drive me so crazy, like make negative judgments about every single guy she meets at Match.com while never acknowledging the Victorian steamer full of baggage she's carrying around on her own back, then letting an older wealthy couple she's recently become friends with convince her that the one decent guy she actually meets through the dating service is too wishy-washy and not worth her time.

But instead of my usual habit of condemning Helen and quitting the novel halfway through, I decided to exercise some of my newfound empathy skills and stay with her story, trying to imagine as I read what it must be like to be one of these nondescript middle-aged divorcees, who are trying to lead a normal life again but who don't come across very well on paper. And I'm glad I did, because as this story continues, it blossoms and gets a lot richer in both tone and stakes than you might imagine at the beginning it would; and it's then that we come to realize why the book is called Under the Influence -- not necessarily because of her alcohol problems, which really only serve as character background, but because Helen's bigger problem is that she lets the people around her blindly dictate how she's going to think and act about the world. And that suddenly makes this a much more interesting story, and helps explain things like her mentally bullying ex who she can't seem to stand up against; and this especially makes for a great climax to the book, when the schism between her wealthy patron friends and her new accountant boyfriend starts becoming a lot bigger and a lot more direct (but I'll leave the details a surprise until you can read them yourself), and Helen is forced to choose, almost for the first time in her life, between two competing groups of friends' influences over how she herself is going to see her life and world.

Make no mistake, this book will drive some people crazy, a virtual blueprint for a Lifetime TV movie whose vague Hillary-Oprah-Nancy-Grace-adherent protagonist (you know the kind of person I'm talking about) is deeply flawed in such a highly realistic way that she will immediately remind you of all those women in real life like this who you can barely stand being around. But as an astute and moving look at what makes women like these tick, its hyper-realism is a big asset, and makes it easy to see why Maynard's previous books have been such big hits within this very crowd. It comes recommended in this spirit, although with the warning that you'll need to do some mental shifting to enjoy this if you're not a Hillary-Oprah-Nancy-Gracer yourself.

Out of 10: 8.8 show less