THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 31, 1995 TAG: 9512310323
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY JUNE ARNEY
LENGTH: Medium: 62 lines
THE PASSION OF ALICE
STEPHANIE GRANT
Houghton Mifflin. 260 pp. $19.95.
We meet Alice Forrester in an upscale eating disorders clinic in Massachusetts where she has whittled her 5-foot-11-inch frame down to 94 pounds through years of anorexia. At 25, she is recovering from a heart attack. The year is 1984.
The Passion of Alice, Stephanie Grant's first novel, is a poignant coming-of-age story about friendship and first love, about lust and imperfection. Grant touches on a wide range of taboos in gritty language that spares no detail. There is nothing pretty or frilly about her images.
The author lives in Brooklyn and curates a reading series for writers in the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center. In The Passion of Alice, she shows a thorough knowledge of the eating disorders that plague Alice and her friends at Seaview Hospital. Grant takes on their thoughts, their dreams, even their stomachs. She sees their epiphanies.
Grant does all this through the first-person account of Alice - a deep-thinking young woman who becomes our prism for the story.
``If I had to say my anorexia was about any single thing, I would have said it was about living without desire,'' Alice says. ``Without longing of any kind.''
The setting of the novel lends a One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest aura to the book. Here in Grant's disquieting novel are unforgettable scenes and characters.
One is Maeve, a raucous, green-eyed woman with a passion for seduction whom Alice comes to love. Maeve teaches her that the secret to success in life - as it is for a good football team - is ``the ability to adapt to sudden change.'' Maeve pukes in her purse, has sex in bathrooms and takes pleasure in baring her breasts.
``She was compelled to show us private things,'' Alice says. ``Like those men in raincoats, only she did it with words.''
Grant has an amazing capacity for depth through her simple language, for unabashed honesty.
``I realized that what I wanted from Maeve wasn't physical,'' Alice says. ``I didn't want to touch her. I didn't spend my day thinking about her sexual parts, her lips, or breasts or behind. And I didn't fantasize about doing specific things like kissing or groping. My desire for Maeve was more like a dress you want intensely. It's not the thing itself, it's what it will do for you. I wanted what she did for me. It was a relief to know.''
One weakness in Grant's book is a slow beginning that eventually clicks into a well-paced novel. Although there are surprises into the final pages, the ending seems flat. Yet, overall, Grant has taken a difficult social issue and spun it into evocative fiction without making it sappy or overly dramatic. MEMO: June Arney is a staff writer. by CNB