The Life Room

by: Jill Bialosky

Published by: Harcourt Books

Reviewed by Julie Failla Earhart

Eleanor Cahn is the protagonist in Jill Bialosky’s second novel, The Life Room. Full-time literature professor, married and mother to two boys, Eleanor is about to take the trip of a lifetime….she is presenting a paper on Anna Karenina at a conference in Paris. She’s torn about going. Eleanor feels what many women feel: torn and guilty for caring as deeply about her work (as a literature professor) as she does her husband and children. The novel opens with a bang and sets the stage for a modern dilemma.

Then I got to page 16 and the beginning of Chapter 4. Ignited by a call from her mother that her childhood friend and probably first love, Stephen, will also be in Paris, begins an excruciatingly long flashback that tediously accounts recounts the men in Eleanor’s life. First there is Stephen; then her high school sweetheart, William; followed by her college affair with the married painter, Adam. It is Adam who introduces her to “the life room,” but the concept is so esoteric that I could never firmly grasp what “the life room” was. The previews claimed there was a lot of eroticism in this work, but I found it woefully short.

Eleanor loves Paris, visiting the museums, presenting her paper (which she is then asked to turn into a book), discussing literature with colleagues (all whom seem American, which I found as rather odd). Still she is happy to come home and take up life where she left off.

Somehow, someway, Stephen shows up and begins to appear in different aspects of her life. Then there is more angst about why he is in her life filled in by flashbacks with William, but mostly Adam, and returned to present time with emails to one of her male colleagues she met in Paris.

Confused? Me too. I think the reader was supposed to feel the pull of work and home, past and present. More important I think the reader is supposed to feel that he/she too can feel both repulsed and raptured by the opposite sex when married. Eleanor seems fascinated with every man in her life but her husband.

Other than the hints that Stephen is a firebug, The Life Room has little going for it.

Armchair Interviews says: Heed this reviewer’s advice.