For me, Elinor Lipman is pleasure reading. The way she strings words together makes me very happy. She reminds me very much of Anne Tyler in that her characters are endearing, even when you would think they wouldn't be, there's a fairy tale quality to the events that occur, and the book is hard to put down.
In The Pursuit of Alice Thrift, Alice Thrift is a struggling med student. She is exhausted. She has poor social skills. She finds herself often on thin ice as a result of those two factors. One day, she meets Ray Russo, a salesman, a prospective patient considering plastic surgery. She tells him his nose is fine. The pursuit begins.
The most endearing aspect of the book is not the relationship between Alice and Ray. The true heart of the story are the friendships that Alice cultivates as the result of her having met Ray. It's a funny story, one that completely charms. At the end of the novel, Lipman thanks her medical consultants, and I realized that despite the humor and the lightness, Lipman does give us a interesting depiction of what it would like to be a med student. That provides the foundation to this improbable romance, to this story of a woman who grows up with a little help from her friends.
The Pursuit of Alice Thrift by Elior Lipman
