The Generosity of Women

By Courtney Eldridge

Joyce, the foul-mouthed and wildly successful curator of a controversial art exhibit on surveillance, who unexpectedly finds herself under surveillance--in her own bedroom. Her best friend, Bobbie, a... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 015101101X
• ISBN13: 9780151011018
• Release Date: June 2009
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 1.0" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

Colorful Drama from multiple persons' viewpoints

This book tells story from multiple persons' perspective. It involves several common characters in the book interacting but describing about the other's from inner self of each other. It reveals more than one viewpoints. It's colorful. it's jumpy going to past and present. Eventually, the colorful disappears and you lose your storyline as if it was told by one person who experienced several lives. Who could tell such stories? My mind is in disarray like watching a soap opera during daytime television show times. It's hard to keep a focus but eventually, each characters comes alive when the pieces come together as I did, when I realized they are linked and finding that link makes the whole picture more comprehensible. Maybe real lesson of this book is to find the link to find peace in our complex life. There are sexual description and adult languages therefore not for children.

Women's Lives in All Their Messy Glory

Courtney Eldridge wowed me with her short stories, and she doesn't disappoint with her first novel. This is a meaty, intense book told in very distinctive voices, some of whom are more likable than others, but each is utterly memorable, and Eldridge waves their messy lives together perfectly. A beach read for those who spend their summers in the city.

I will be there for you ... no matter what!

Is the message I received from this lovely little novel. The characters were Joyce, Bobbie, Lisa, Lynne, Jordan, and Adela. For some reason I just don't understand the complexity of most relationships between women. It always seems there's some sort of game going on and no one told me the rules. It seems in most relationships, kindness if not ultimately loving kindness, often prevails. That's what I experienced as I read The Generosity of Women. The lives and relationships seemed familiar as I got further and further into the story. Although the story was about the difference between the women as much as it was about how their lives were interwoven, ultimately they came together. As I came to the end of the story I can only hope I'll have a few really good friends who will be there for me no matter what, and I'll be there for them as well.

Best book I have read this year; HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

I am so glad to read a book that digs into the conflicting and disturbing motivations that inform feminine friendships and sexuality without relying on the superficial, pat observations that currently comprise a lot of popular literature. In "The Generosity of Women," Courtney Eldridge delivers us back to the messy, potentially wounding world of writers like Joan Didion. Although the book is composed of first-person female voices spanning the spectrum of age, class, independence and temperament, men remain central to each character's psychic gestalt --as boyfriends, fathers, objects of desire and distributors of love, disdain and abuse. The author introduces this world with a virtuosic command of rhythm, tone and human feeling. She has a remarkable ear for the nuances of modern speech and an eye for the unspoken signal. This incisive perception can deliver some painful, uncomfortable results--more than once I glanced around the subway car to check if my reaction to the book was as palpable as it was felt. It is a great reward to see human thoughts, fears and gestures being considered and illuminated in such a striking and powerful way.

This is something really special

I am surprised at the two other reviews here--I can't help but think that these people simply don't get it. When I read this book, yes, it took time, and I re-read the first few pages again OUT LOUD--and then it clicked and I realized I was reading something really special. Something beautifully intricate and thought-provoking, and ultimately, brilliant. But not "brilliant' in a way that I had to plunder through it, but brilliant in that I started to think intensely about each character, savoring each sentence and deliberately slowing down my reading so that I wouldn't finish the book and be without something wonderful to read. So I can say, wholeheartedly, you should give this a whirl. For fans of Kate Christensen and intelligent women writers everywhere, this is the book for you.