Equal Affections

by David Leavitt

Book Overview

Equal Affections tells the story of the funny, loving, and tragic Cooper family. Louise, the indomitable matriarch, has had cancer for twenty years. Her son Danny, a lawyer, lives in a New Jersey suburb with his lover Walter, who is slowly growing obsessed with on-line sex; her daughter April is a lesbian activist and folk singer, who knows how to perform a do-it-yourself artificial insemination using basic kitchen utensils. As Louise battles the...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802135315
• ISBN13: 9780802135315
• Release Date: September 1997
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Something Deeper...

My fellow students and I were assigned this book in an American Studies class. While I have read a great deal of books--have been enthralled by a multitude of works--I keep going back to this book. It's not that the characters in Equal Affections do extraordinary things, or that the situations presented are extraordinary; what attracts me to this book is because who and what are depicted are real. David Leavitt paints a picture of many issues that affect contemporary American society. Suffice it to say that he even depicts thoughts and opinions of generations past. While his characters' struggles and experiences may not apply to ALL Americans and/or their families, David Leavitt produces images, ideals, ideologies, anxieties, and other issues that continue to play an inherent role in the shaping and structuring of contemporary American culture. While discussing this novel in my class, I was struck by how much of an impact this book had on my classmates. We each felt the need to discuss our own opinions and thoughts, including factual personal experiences, pertaining to the characters and situations in the novel: April's lesbianism and pregnancy, Walter's infidelity, Danny's demeanor, Louise's illness and her struggle for identity and independence, Nat's affair with Lillian Two-Names. In my opinion, a qualifying characteristic of a good novel lies in what kind of response (not exactly quanitity, but quality) it can provoke. Although there are some issues in the book that I would have liked David Leavitt to explore more thoroughly (such as April's sexuality and her response to it), I believe that this is a very good novel. To me, David Leavitt conveys the fact that Americans' lives are not "perfect." He tells us that nothing can be exactly permanent, whether in sexuality, love, the stipulations that previous generations and society have placed upon us, and even society itself.