Summary:

Eleanor Lightbody (Bridget Fonda) and her husband Will (Matthew Broderick) travel to the Battle Creek Sanitarium for the cure. On the train, they meet Charlie Ossining (John Cusak) who hopes to make his fortune in the booming breakfast food industry. The san is run on strict rules of vegetarianism and sexual abstinence by John Harvey Kellogg (Anthony Hopkins), inventor of the corn flake. Regular enemas, exercises, outings and baths are prescribed, but Will repeatedly breaks the rules and is lured into liaisons with a chlorotic fellow patient and his nurse.

Eventually, he and Eleanor turn to other unconventional treatments, which are not sanctioned by Kellogg, including nudism and sexual stimulation. Meanwhile Charlie joins up with George Kellogg (Dana Carvey), the Doctor's adopted but estranged son, who taunts his father when he is not extorting money from him. George sets the san on fire, but is reconciled with Kellogg during the conflagration when he sobs "Daddy give us a cuddle." The Lightbodys go home to a moderate pursuit of health.

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Blind dolls' dressmaker Bertha Plummer is the center of a significant subplot to this story of marriage and deception. Bertha and her toymaker father, Caleb, live in squalor in a "little cracked nutshell" house and work for hardhearted Tackleton. Caleb has convinced Bertha that their cottage and their employer are both charming. She falls in love with Tackleton and is traumatized by his engagement to another.

Caleb's confession of his well-meaning deceit compounds her suffering. Bertha's literal blindness parallels the figurative blindness in the main plot, in which Dot Peerybingle's innocent secrets make her husband John suspect she loves another. The story ends in reconciliation and happiness all around; Bertha plays the harp while the others dance.

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Black and Blue is a novel portraying the new life of Beth Crenshaw, formerly Fran Benedetto, after her escape with her son Robert from a passionate marriage that had turned into an abusive nightmare. It chronicles how she left, why she stayed, and what she gave up--materially, professionally, emotionally--in her attempt to find a safe new life.

The book, written in the first person, includes many flashbacks as she chronicles the early signs of her husband Bobby’s rage that turned on her, her successful attempts at denial, the years of hiding her secret, her attempts at protecting her son from the knowledge of his father’s malevolence, and the final destructive act that gave her the courage to leave. Winding her way from New York to Florida, covering her tracks, helped by an underground network of women committed to saving battered women’s lives, Beth attempts to start over, always with the background noise of her history and ubiquitous fear of her husband’s appearance.

He does, of course, eventually show up at her home--Robert misses his father and phones him--and after beating her one last time, takes Robert with him. At the story’s end, we find Beth in a new marriage with a new daughter Grace, but her life is forever marred: "There’s not a day when I haven’t wondered whether I did the right thing, leaving Bobby. But of course if I hadn’t, there would have been no . . . Grace Ann. Your children make it impossible to regret your past. They’re its finest fruits. Sometimes its only ones."

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In the fall of 1907, Will and Eleanor Lightbody, a wealthy, neurotic couple from Peterskill, New York travel to Battle Creek, Michigan to immerse themselves in the routine of the famous sanitarium run by corn-flake inventor, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg. They meet Charlie Ossining who is seeking his fortune in the fickle market of Battle Creek's breakfast food industry. The Lightbodys have just lost their infant daughter and Eleanor is taking Will to the "san" for the cure. An inveterate meat-eater with a sexual appetite, Will was addicted, first to alcohol, and then, to opium, after his wife spiked his coffee with an off-the-shelf-remedy for drink.

At the sanitarium, they must occupy separate rooms, refrain from sex, and piously eat inflexible non-meat diets. Therapies include five daily enemas, exercises, "radiated" water, and an electrical "sinusoidal bath," which accidentally fries one of the residents. Kellogg is gravely disappointed in Will's inability to toe the "physiologic" line, but he is more deeply disturbed by his adopted son, George, whose chosen life on the street is a perpetual embarrassment.

Worried about his sexual prowess and deprived of his wife, Will becomes obsessed with his beautiful nurse and opts for the stimulation of an electrical belt; equally frustrated and bent on self-starvation, his wife turns to the quack "Dr Spitzvogel" who specializes in nudism and "manipulation of the womb." Brought to their senses by humiliation, Will and Eleanor go home.

Meanwhile, Charlie has joined with George Kellogg and borrowed from Will to keep his business afloat, but he realizes that he has been swindled. He only narrowly escapes jail, during a fiery commotion created by George who is then murdered by his adoptive father.

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A very accessible collection of poems with wonderful use of language and very strong imagery. Some, in particular "Baby Random" and "Between Rounds" offer a nurse’s perspective on caregiving. Other themes include abuse and abusive relationships, married and unmarried life, and in general the seeking and giving of refuge. There are also recurring figures/persons throughout the collection which give the work an almost narrative flow.

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As a young woman, Fermina Daza kept a lengthy and passionate correspondence with Florentino Ariza, who was socially her inferior, but was desperately in love with her. They became engaged through their letters, exchanged through hiding places and telegrams in code.

But one day, when Fermina Daza comes close to Florentino Ariza in the market, she feels suddenly ill and tells him it was all a mistake. Instead, she marries Dr. Juvenal Urbino, a European-educated perfectionist, who falls in love with her on a medical visit. Their tumultuous but affectionate marriage lasts over fifty years, through a civil war, cholera outbreaks and the Doctor's brief affair with a patient. Juvenal Urbino distinguishes himself by instituting policies to combat cholera. He dies, falling from a tree as he attempts to catch his pet parrot.

Florentino Ariza comes to the wake. He is now about seventy and controls a wealthy shipping operation. After the other guests leave, he approaches Fermina Daza, saying, "I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century, to repeat to you once again my vow of eternal fidelity and ever-lasting love."

She throws him out of the house, but continues to think of him. He becomes a regular visitor. Finally, they take a boat ride together, down the rivers that are being slowly drained and poisoned, listening for the cries of the manatees. They do not return, but prepare to sail on forever.

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At some indeterminate point in time and space following World War II, George remembers telling Corinne the story he has told Blum. The discontinuous, contiguous rememberings and tellings--rememberings of tellings, tellings of rememberings--are the labyrinthine elements of George's searches for meanings: to his own life, to his ancestral identity, to the disastrous routing of French troops by German in May 1940, to the human condition. In the course of their textual wanderings, narrator and reader return again and again to specific scenes--trying to make sense of life and death, and the cardinal, corporal points between.

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Laurence "Tubby" Passmore is a successful scriptwriter for a television sitcom, in his mid-fifties, married and the father of two grown children. He is indecisive and inexplicably depressed, unhappy with himself, his fat body, bald head, wonky knee, and impending impotence. At least, he is confident in his marriage to Sally, an attractive, self-made academic who enjoys sex; on weekly jaunts to London, he maintains a supportive but platonic relationship with the earthy Amy.

Seeking to alleviate his woes, he dabbles in acupuncture and aromatherapy and regularly attends a blind physiotherapist and a woman psychiatrist; the latter counsels him to write a journal. His wife suddenly announces her wish for a divorce and the television network invokes a contractual obligation to make unwelcome demands on his skills. These events shatter his unappreciated but complacent "angst" and deepen his identity crisis.

Laurence scrambles to rediscover himself. He reads the gloomy, Kierkegaard--because he identified with the titles--and he travels to the existentialist's Copenhagen. He pushes the boundaries of his relationship with Amy in a maudlin trip to Tenerife. He befriends a philosophic squatter, called "Grahame" (with an "e" no doubt to distinguish him from Graham Green whose "writing is a form of therapy" is an epigraph to this book). He flies wildly off to Los Angeles hoping to rekindle a one-night stand "manqué." Finally he recalls and tracks the Irish Catholic, Maureen, his first girlfriend from forty years before. Maureen has suffered too--the death of her son and breast cancer; he finds her on the Road to Compostella.

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Ruthie is a thirty five year old overweight mother of two married to Ruben. Ever since her marriage, she has experienced pain with intercourse. She feels like an odd contradiction, with too much flesh and too narrow a vaginal opening, able to experience childbirth but not intercourse. She has read books about pain with intercourse, has tried lubrication, like her doctor recommended, but still the pain continues. She cannot imagine painless intercourse without completely leaving her body and wonders if she would ever get it back afterward.

She imagines what her life would be like if intercourse didn't hurt, how she would be fearless, attractive, sexual; how her husband would no longer turn away from her with indifference. As long as sex is painful, her life is concrete, full of duty and care. She imagines that without pain she would transcend this drudgery, even transcend her husband, and enter an ethereal world which centers around her.

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A grown daughter recounts how her mother suddenly left her family for another man and moved away. The author feels alternately puzzled and betrayed by her mother's leaving. With her mother's help, she explores the complex connections between her mother's action and her mother's experience of having a stillborn child many years before.

She describes how each family member reacted to the discovery that the child was stillborn, how the nurses took the baby away and wouldn't let her parents hold him, and how little they actually grieved over or talked about the baby afterward. In her role as protector of her family, shielding everyone else from the pain of the stillbirth, the author's mother lost something central of herself. She left her family in order to begin to find it.

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