Heroic Measures
Jill Ciment, 2009
Knopf Doubleday
208 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307386786
Summary
From the author of Tattoo Artist, a new novel—taut, moving, accomplished—set in a fraught, post-9/11 New York...about real estate, dog love, and a city on alert.
A gasoline tanker truck is “stuck” in the Midtown Tunnel. New Yorkers are panicked. Is this the next big attack?
Alex, an artist, and Ruth, a former schoolteacher with an FBI file as thick as a dictionary, must get their beloved dachshund, whose back legs have suddenly become paralyzed, to the animal hospital sixty blocks north. But the streets of Manhattan are welded with traffic. Their dog, Dorothy, twelve-years-old and gray-faced, is the emotional center of Alex and Ruth's forty-five-year-long childless marriage. Using a cutting board as a stretcher, they ferry the dog uptown.
This is also the weekend that Alex and Ruth must sell their apartment. While house hunters traipse through it during their open house, husband and wife wait by the phone to hear from the animal hospital. During the course of forty-eight hours, as the missing truck driver terrorizes the city, the price of their apartment becomes a barometer for collective hope and despair, as the real estate market spikes and troughs with every breaking news story.
In shifting points of view—Alex’s, Ruth’s, and the little dog’s —man, woman, and one small tenacious beast try to make sense of the cacophony of rumors, opinions, and innuendos coming from news anchors, cable TV pundits, pollsters, bomb experts, hostages,witnesses, real estate agents, house hunters, bargain seekers, howling dogs, veterinarians, nurses, and cab drivers.
A moving, deftly told novel of ultrahigh-urban anxiety. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 20, 1955
• Where—Montreal, Canada
• Education—M.F.A., University of California, Irvine (USA)
• Awards—Two New York State Foundation for the Arts Fellowships; National Endowment for the Arts
Fellowship; Guggenheim Foundation grant; Janet Hiedinger Kafka Prize; NEA Japan Fellowship Prize.
• Currently—lives in Gainesville, Florida
Jill Ciment was born in Montreal, Canada. Her books include three novels, Tattoo Artist, Teeth of the Dog and The Law of Falling Bodies; a collection of short stories, Small Claims; and a memoir, Half a Life. She has been awarded two New York State Foundation for the Arts Fellowships and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Ciment is a professor of English at the University of Florida. She lives in Gainesville, Florida. (From the publisher and Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Yet the core of Heroic Measures is the patient, specific laying forth of the lives of this childless septuagenarian couple, these City College graduates with their little dog, their fluorescent light over the kitchen sink, their regular ethnic dinner with friends, their love for Chekhov and, yes, their Viagra-aided sex life. These quotidian but palpably truthful details add up to a story that doesn’t seem at all unconvincing. If that seems like faint praise, well, this isn’t a novel that goes for a big plot payoff (despite Pamir’s antics) or courts raves with ambitious prose. With this 48-hour portrait of a marriage in which troubles flare only briefly, Ciment seems to be aiming for something lighter and yet more real.
Caitlin Macy - New York Times
Read Jill Ciment’s Heroic Measures for its painterly depictions of a rattled city, its deliciously biting satire of media and real estate madness, its tender knowledge of the creaturely ties that bind.
O Magazine
Ciment's spare and surprisingly gripping novel details one long weekend in the life of Ruth and Alex Cohen, an elderly New York couple hoping to sell their East Village apartment of 45 years.... Ciment plays the veterinary, real estate and domestic details like elements of a thriller plot, while the couple's love of their dog provides heartrending texture.
Publishers Weekly
Three days of personal and public disasters form the scene of this latest from Ciment (The Tattoo Artist).... The story is touching, with more than a little wry humor aimed at the easily agitated media and the vagaries of real estate in New York. By the end of the first chapter, the reader feels at home with Ruth, Alex, and their little dog.
Amy Ford - Library Journal
Three disparate narrative elements—a possible terrorist attack, the real-estate market in New York City, a sick dachshund-somehow cohere into a blackly comic yet tenderly touching novel..... Could have been loopy in less deft hands, but Ciment keeps things lively and edgy throughout.
Kirkus Reviews
Book Club Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Heroic Measures:
1. How does Ciment treat the lives of Ruth and Alex as an aging couple? Does she emphasize their limitations, using them as a point of humor? Or does she present their aging as a normal phase of life? The couple have been together for 45 years; how would you describe their relationship?
2. Dorothy, of course, is almost more important a character than Alex—she's given her own "voice." How did you react to Dorothyt's narration? Is she "believable" as a character? What about her name: in what way might Dorothy allude to the heroine of The Wizard of Oz?
3. Many readers and critics say that the state of Dorothy's health worried them more than the terrorist's threat—that her out-come was more important than the city's. Was that your experience reading the book? Symbolically, how might the dog's illness reflect (or structurally parallel) what's happening in New York?
4. Talk about Abdul Pamir as a character. Do you find him sympathetic, pathetic...or what? Is there humor in his situation...or is it not particularly funny to you? What about the moment when the police bomb-sniffing German Shepherd approaches Pamir?
5. Ciment takes aim at Americans', in particular New Yorkers', high anxiety about terrorist attacks. On whom (or what) does she level her satiric eye? Who is most ridiculous in this story —and why? Is her humor fairly leveled, or does the public have reason to be frightened?
6. In what way does the real estate market track the city's level of anxiety?
7. Alex is creating a work based on Ruth's FBI file. What do we learn about Ruth's past? And how does that past, especially with regards to the House Un-American Activities Committee, connect thematically to the present?
8. What is the significance of the book's title, Heroic Measures?
9. Does this book deliver for you? Did you enjoy the dialogue, characters and fast-paced, thriller-like plot?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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