Reviews for More Than It Hurts You

The average rating for More Than It Hurts You based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-06-22 00:00:00 Peter Moak Pyp Exp A comment below hints at some of my concerns as I got underway, and the book never really broke from its initial, out-of-the-gate stride. A fast read, and casually engaging, but its ambitious ingredients (the sweep of a social-issues canvas, the page-turner, the incisive character satire) never synthesized into a satisfying meal. Besides its indebtedness to Franzen and Wolfe, there were explicit head-nods to Amis and to Bellow, hints of Atwood at her sliest and sharpest. All great people to steal from, to emulate, but this felt more like karaoke (or maybe, at best, a good cover band) of such stuff. I could probably waste more of your time trying to diagnose the novel's weaknesses or defending my relative disengagement, but... this is another book (like Wroblewski's recent, much-loved Edgar Sawtelle ) that I think just wasn't my cup of joe. Taken as a dark-comic melodrama, it's probably a pretty fine read, and my "recommended to" tag-line was meant sincerely, not dismissively. But I came in expecting something more psychologically and socially incisive, and with a lot more top-spin in the prose.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-05-07 00:00:00 Vicki Mottley This is an absorbing psychological study of what people do to motivate themselves and others as well as what secrets and lies they tell themselves to do so. At one point a main character asks himself "How much blindness does a happy life require?" On the surface, this is a story about a family dealing with allegations of Munchausen by Proxy (where a parent makes a child ill or hurts it to get the attention for themselves). But that is only one layer of the deep and varied textures of this story. Fidelity, racism, abandonment, love, hate, and status all come into play throughout the book, with a constant strong current of redemption at any cost running under it all.