The Constant Reader

Still Alice is Lisa Genova’s first novel. A spare-no-details depiction of a woman’s descent into early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, it makes for grim reading—how grim might depend on your age and/or family history. Alice Howland is a psychology professor at Harvard. At the top of her demanding profession, she is married with three grown children and a husband who is also a high-performing academic. Genova is not a born writer and her prose, especially in the book’s early sections, is stiff and unconvincing—we see Alice but don’t feel her. Ironically, the story gets better as Alice disintegrates. Her husband’s unwillingness to accept the diagnosis and her children’s initial confusion are convincing, as is Alice’s prolonged refusal to give in to the truth of her rapidly failing sense of reality. It’s easy to believe that this is how it might feel to lose one’s mind, literally. Genova bravely sticks to her established point of view, which is Alice’s, even when confronted with depicting a mental condition that is beyond language and for the most part, carries it off. In a sense this is not so much a novel as a psychological study of a woman suffering from a disease the reader can only hope to be spared.