Knowing Bock’s investment in Alice & Oliver — how closely he’s connected to the material — adds a deeper dimension to the story. It also means the book runs the risk of appearing too biased, too sentimental. Yet this is a novel, not a memoir, and by deliberately creating characters that were not mirror images of him and his wife but, instead, two unique souls forging their own muddled paths to recovery, Bock found enough distance to write a palpably raw yet surprisingly objective snapshot of the myriad ways illness can wield control over our lives.
Alice & Oliver has flaws considerably less important than its tough-minded commitment to truth-telling and to honoring the complexities, contradictions and even the cruelties of people under extreme duress. Lasting damage and lasting loyalties are equally part of the human condition, Bock reminds us in an elegantly rueful epilogue set in 2010: Death happens, and life goes on.
...the book’s greatest strength lies in the clarity with which Alice’s disease unfolds, and the most touching bits are a series of stand-alone case studies of the patients Alice and Oliver encounter briefly in the hospital...But when characters are sketches with underdeveloped relationships, the losses they experience can’t exert an emotional hold on the reader, who can’t follow them into their guilt or their bouts of weeping.
Alice & Oliver is at its best as a story about how a couple must develop an internal GPS to recalculate the path through unfamiliar territory, when the things that attract them to each other and the comfort of their routines begin to get scraped away...the true-life elements of the novel are meaningful only in terms of the novel's main flaw: If the book avoids wearing its heart on its sleeve the way Love Story did (thank goodness), it does sometimes overshare its research.
The novel's source, no doubt, imbues it with authority, but its literary power derives from Bock's elastic language, stretching from his detailed inventories of extreme medical procedures to the lyric melancholy of his descriptions of mood and place...Alice & Oliver is both haunting and raw — a rare novel about cancer that, in this case, doesn't try to find meaning in serious illness, but rather gives its random malevolence its full due.
In the extremes of serious illness, as Bock well knows, life is about a surplus of technical detail; it’s about the exhaustion of uncertainty, of too many attempts at alertness, of too much energy expended in gauging who is advocating for whom. Bock doesn’t balk at the tedious minutiae of disease, and in this way — and by, for the most part, refusing to romanticize Alice herself — he avoids most cliches attending a novel of this kind. Yet his book as a whole is far from polished.
Much as I loved this novel, the acknowledgments at the end — where Bock speaks candidly about the origins of the story and its relationship to his real life — made me love it twice as much. Instead of blurring the beauty and truth of the novel with inevitable questions about 'how much is true' and 'why didn’t he write a memoir,' those questions are directly answered — and the answers make you see why fiction was a great choice, allowing him to develop his heroine in a way that would have been impossible in memoir...
Bock captures how you can feel dropped into an ocean of new clinical vocabulary, each word carrying life-and-death stakes ... Bock also painstakingly renders our American healthcare system in all its logic-free anti-glory ... The novel is weaker, however, in its depiction of Alice and Oliver as individuals...Both come close to being Manhatttanite clichés: well-educated, creative, and most notably, privileged...No one in the book calls Alice and Oliver out on their difficult behavior, and neither character seems particularly bothered by the fact that every annoying person on their grim journey happens to be a person of color, while everyone helpful is white ... As a novel about marriage, Alice and Oliver is at its most successful. Bock paints how marriage can help these two flawed individuals transcend their own limitations in a time of crisis.
