The magic molehill

...The stilted fashions of an arrested culture gave them an antique look, like cars with tailfins...

...he makes Ruth stupid, a little slow and dull-witted: add, "She wanted to escape, which is "Blind, blind, blind," sighs Betsy Trotwood in David Copperfield as the eponymous narrator proudly declares his passion for the wrong woman...

...Each is somewhat damaged...

...As the narrator, Ruth's boyfriend Joseph, finds himself drawn into her disease, he treks to the library for marathon sessions reading about eating disorders: "I became a binge reader," he explains, in case we missed the point—and we are left disbelieving that any young man capable of giving this explanation is capable of acting this way...

...Since Joseph's own disorders drive him to a frenzied gallantry that exacerbates Ruth's morbid self-imaginings, the pair quickly become locked into an escalating and mutually sustaining madness...

...The exact number of women suffering from anorexia and bulimia is hard to determine, with statistics about mortality rates manipulated to advance various political agendas...

...fine, except that I had already been born...

...Though he eventually thwarts it and turns it back to his anorexic themes, Rosen's scene of seduction over Scrab-ble—Ruth and Joseph introducing raunchier and raunchier words into their play—is a near-classic set piece...

...Eve's Apple has some marvelous descriptive turns...

...But these first-novel flaws are worth noticing in Eve's Apple only because Jonathan Rosen is a first novelist very much worth noticing— a new writer with real promise and a set of the sort of traditional literary talents we haven't seen much of for a generation or more...

...As the story opens, Ruth and Joseph, two young lovers who met while undergraduates at Columbia, are living together in a New York apartment...

...But young authors writing their first novels are usually too much in love with their narrating heroes—too proud of their firstborn children—to hide from them themes and knowledge meant only for the reader...

...Though in response to her pregnancy Joseph at first continues his destructive and unhelpful attitude of "deep caring," the knowledge that they have killed something (Rosen's Joseph cannot quite bring himself to call it a baby) gradually brings him awake...

...On the question of the longing to be thin and the fact that "many women hate themselves," however, the novel is more ambiguous: sometimes suggesting that eating disorders are delusions we can end simply by having stronger characters, and sometimes suggesting that they are cultural artifacts nothing less than the destruction of the West will cure...

...Joseph is subject to massive migraines that began shortly after his sister committed suicide at the age of 16, leaving a note that made him feel responsible for not saving her...

...Interestingly, it is Ruth who manages to force her lover to some decisive action, with a pair of insane episodes: an aborted pregnancy and a six-week trip to Europe that leaves her weighing only 88 pounds...

...Both sorts of flaws are present from the beginning of Jonathan J. Bottum, a contributing editor, last wrote for The Weekly Standard about T.S...

...There is a reason that, taken as plaining of her mother, "She wanted a class, the narrators of most great to have her kids and eat them, too"— first-person novels tend to be a little he can't let alone...

...But I cannot think of any other new novelist who has a better chance to write a great American novel...

...I failed her," he explains to a psychiatrist who has befriended the couple...

...Ruth is an over-self-conscious, over-thin girl with a history of forays into nearly every known species of anorexia and bulimia and a library that consists of nothing but fairy tales and feminist tracts on eating disorders...

...Eliot's early poetry...

...There is a self-conscious reference late in the novel to Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, and the reference is not inappropriate: With its attempt to organize around an illness a social critique, a portrayal of the eternal woe between men and women, and a philosophical anthropology, Eve's Apple reads like the novel a contemporary Thomas Mann would produce if he tried to write the great novel of his maturity a little before he was quite ready...

...But there is regardless something very present about eating disorders among young women in America, and Rosen has found a powerful lens through which to look at the current culture of sexual desire and psychiatric reductionism...

...The daughter of rich and successful parents, Ruth is studying to be a painter while Joseph has found a job teaching English to Russian immigrants in a low-budget language school...

...A worse result is the destruction of the motive for action: Characters who understand why they do the destructive things they do, after all, probably wouldn't do them...

...His novelists to learn is how to first good line—an anorexic young keep their characters in the woman named Ruth Simon comdark...

...The cultural editor of the Forward, he has the intelligence, the learning, and the feeling it takes to do substantial work...

...One typical result is a relentless over-explaining in the prose, a ceaseless nudging of the reader to understand...

...After a disturbing scene in the first chapter—when he kisses Ruth coming out of the bathroom after a dinner with her mother and tastes the shreds of self-induced vomit still clinging to the corners of her mouth—Joseph begins his quest to save his beloved from her disease: prying into her diary, questioning her psychiatrist, and making his daily pilgrimages to the reading room at the New York Public Library...

...When he sees her condition upon her return from Europe—and learns, in a surprise twist, some disturbing news about her abortion—he at last takes Ruth to a sanitarium for psychiatric help...

...So too he needs to take on the deeper problem of religion, recognizing that the critique he performs of "psychologized" American culture does not really allow him to resolve his love story, with Ruth's admittance to a psychiatric hospital, by recourse to the hackneyed 1950s stage character of the wise and caring psychoanalyst...

...For his next novel, Rosen needs to allow himself more room for humor—remembering that Mann presented the TB sanitarium in The Magic Mountain primarily as a stage for the human comedy, despite the fact that tuberculosis was at the time among the most common causes of death in Europe and America...

...Their clothing, like their English, had an unmistakable accent," Joseph says of his Russian students...

...At one point, he even calls Ruth by his sister's name...

...This author's promise may be measured by the fact that his prose and command of his material improve as Eve's Apple progresses, gradually working to understand and cure the typical first-novel flaws of over-explanation by an over-knowing narrator...

...I'm not going to fail Ruth...

...But, as we are reminded a little too often, Ruth's illness is the kind that thrives as much on attention as it does on neglect...