Sarah Kerr
Whatever the proximate cause, we all will die in the end, probably with pain, possibly with some alteration of self before it is over. This is no revelation. Yet depictions of the body in an off-kilter condition have been a mainstay recently, not just of the hospital dramas that dominate TV but of much fiction. The fascination is in tune with a culture that knows exponentially more about the workings of the body than has any in history but that remains, even with the technical know-how, unable to meet many challenges to it. We know so much that, it seems, Zoë Heller is a witty, observant portraitist of misanthropes. She takes a bit of a risk with her brisk, showily unsentimental protagonists whose surface confidence hides layers of rage. Rage can be gripping and funny. But overconfidence in one’s harsh judgment of others and blindness to one’s own pursuit of vast, subterranean emotional needs are qualities tougher to reform and harder to warm up to, than, say, the emotional haplessness mined by Nick Hornby.