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A review by silvej01
Human Blues by Elisa Albert
2.0
Rising professional singer/songwriter Aviva Rosner is the main and the only truly realized character in this close third person narrative. Influenced by her musical idol, Amy Winehouse, Aviva writes and performs truth-telling, let-it-all-hang-out songs about herself and her grievances. The novel opens as she has recently finished recording her fourth album, Womb Service, which offers a series of songs related to the menstrual cycle and related biological issues affecting women in general and Aviva in particular.
I might be wrong, but I assumed that Albert intends for us to respect Aviva for her down-to-earth honesty. If so, she failed with me. After a while I came to find her a singularly unappealing character. Lacking warmth, she primarily seems to have contempt for most of the people around her.
Aviva does seem to respect her husband Sam, who is an upstate NY gentile high school teacher. He is a kind man who loves her, but he is a largely underdeveloped character. And Aviva has not been able to get pregnant with him. Having been tested, the couple knows his “junk” is healthy, leaving Aviva to be forever searching, forever questioning, forever ruminating on what, likely, is going on with her. While mostly doing her best to remain sexually faithful to Sam, Aviva’s relationship with Sam does not otherwise have much of a role in her life or her plans.
True, it has been a hard road for her. Raised in LA in a dysfunctional Jewish family, her father was distracted and neglectful, and her mother was endlessly passive-aggressive. The one brother she liked died some years earlier and her living brother is heartless and mean. Music has been her outlet.
But now, more than her music, Aviva desperately, obsessively, wants to be pregnant. While nothing like the substance abuser that Winehouse was, Aviva occasionally will micro-dose psychedelics and use other recreational drugs, and yet she is completely and, despite her efforts to articulate her feelings, rather inexplicably averse to medical interventions for her pregnancy, especially IVF. Her abhorrence of artificially induced pregnancy is a subject in the lyrics of her songs. With the focus so strongly on becoming pregnant and so little on having a baby, it seemed that achieving a natural pregnancy is her sole goal, with little interest in what comes later.
As a musician and performer, Aviva travels to various locales—LA, NYC, Albany, London, and a yoga resort in an unnamed “tourist-friendly” Central American country (Costa Rica? —in this way too, since she names all her US and UK locations, that she does not bother naming this country seems another example of Aviva’s contempt and condescension). Despite the changes in geography, there is little narrative movement. Mostly she just thinks about her failure to get pregnant, the possible obstacles preventing her, and what she might do, short of IVF, to finally succeed.
As I longed to finish this (audio)book, I found myself fantasizing about giving it an even more negative review than this one, but a total pan seemed unfair. Albert writes with energy and verve. She can be entertaining and funny, albeit mostly in a biting and sneering way. There are some interesting diversions about family life, the music business, some real-life musicians—Amy, especially, but others too who have been influences in Aviva’s development. (Also, the audiobook’s narrator, Mia Barron. is outstanding.) Especially early on, the book kept me mildly satisfied but this was partly owing to a misplaced confidence it would eventually branch out to other plotlines and relationships; important as it might be for her, surely the story would not remain focused solely on Aviva’s frustrations over her failure to get pregnant. Alas, no. Ultimately, the initial sympathetic feelings for her plight gave way to a deepening concern about the sort of parent this mostly unsympathetic, angry, and often mean-spirited person would likely be.
I might be wrong, but I assumed that Albert intends for us to respect Aviva for her down-to-earth honesty. If so, she failed with me. After a while I came to find her a singularly unappealing character. Lacking warmth, she primarily seems to have contempt for most of the people around her.
Aviva does seem to respect her husband Sam, who is an upstate NY gentile high school teacher. He is a kind man who loves her, but he is a largely underdeveloped character. And Aviva has not been able to get pregnant with him. Having been tested, the couple knows his “junk” is healthy, leaving Aviva to be forever searching, forever questioning, forever ruminating on what, likely, is going on with her. While mostly doing her best to remain sexually faithful to Sam, Aviva’s relationship with Sam does not otherwise have much of a role in her life or her plans.
True, it has been a hard road for her. Raised in LA in a dysfunctional Jewish family, her father was distracted and neglectful, and her mother was endlessly passive-aggressive. The one brother she liked died some years earlier and her living brother is heartless and mean. Music has been her outlet.
But now, more than her music, Aviva desperately, obsessively, wants to be pregnant. While nothing like the substance abuser that Winehouse was, Aviva occasionally will micro-dose psychedelics and use other recreational drugs, and yet she is completely and, despite her efforts to articulate her feelings, rather inexplicably averse to medical interventions for her pregnancy, especially IVF. Her abhorrence of artificially induced pregnancy is a subject in the lyrics of her songs. With the focus so strongly on becoming pregnant and so little on having a baby, it seemed that achieving a natural pregnancy is her sole goal, with little interest in what comes later.
As a musician and performer, Aviva travels to various locales—LA, NYC, Albany, London, and a yoga resort in an unnamed “tourist-friendly” Central American country (Costa Rica? —in this way too, since she names all her US and UK locations, that she does not bother naming this country seems another example of Aviva’s contempt and condescension). Despite the changes in geography, there is little narrative movement. Mostly she just thinks about her failure to get pregnant, the possible obstacles preventing her, and what she might do, short of IVF, to finally succeed.
As I longed to finish this (audio)book, I found myself fantasizing about giving it an even more negative review than this one, but a total pan seemed unfair. Albert writes with energy and verve. She can be entertaining and funny, albeit mostly in a biting and sneering way. There are some interesting diversions about family life, the music business, some real-life musicians—Amy, especially, but others too who have been influences in Aviva’s development. (Also, the audiobook’s narrator, Mia Barron. is outstanding.) Especially early on, the book kept me mildly satisfied but this was partly owing to a misplaced confidence it would eventually branch out to other plotlines and relationships; important as it might be for her, surely the story would not remain focused solely on Aviva’s frustrations over her failure to get pregnant. Alas, no. Ultimately, the initial sympathetic feelings for her plight gave way to a deepening concern about the sort of parent this mostly unsympathetic, angry, and often mean-spirited person would likely be.