See also:

Why I'm Glad I Had Breast Cancer (autobiographical)

Apart from You

by

Leonore H. Dvorkin

Wildside Press, 2000, ISBN 1-58715-074-3
(Click on the above image for a larger picture of the cover.)

"A brilliant first novel, thoroughly evolved and gorgeously executed."             - Alan Rodgers, author of Fire and Night "Gripping and powerful."             - Community News, Denver (Click here for full review.)

The novel is set in 1967 and 1968, first in Mobile, Alabama and then at Indiana University in Bloomington. (I went to school there from 1964-68; my author husband, David Dvorkin, was there from 1961-67.) However, the story is only slightly autobiographical, and it's in no way a 1960s political novel; Vietnam barely gets mentioned. The themes are deception, alienation, separation, and miscommunication between spouses, parents and children, sisters, lovers, and friends. Infidelity and sibling rivalry occupy emotional center stage. The two main characters are Elizabeth Nye, a 20-year-old German major, and Brian Petersen, the 27-year-old history teaching assistant with whom she has a five-week affair while she's temporarily separated from her liberal-minded fiancé, Alan Abrams. Elizabeth is dishonest and selfish while Brian is naive and idealistic, but virtually no one in this story is either all good or all bad. That's what makes them people rather than stereotypes. The absent Alan appears just often enough in the story to make it clear that Elizabeth will never forsake this flawed soulmate of hers for the sensitive but priggish Brian. There's no happy ending for Brian, as Elizabeth eventually tells him the truth and goes back to Alan, but the final pages make it clear that Brian is left with a small measure of optimism for the future. The final message - literally delivered in the last line - is one of hope. Minor and cameo characters include Elizabeth's self-indulgent academic father, her sexy younger sister, a not-so-merry widowed neighbor, Brian's excessively beloved older sister, his pined-after lost love, that woman's life-hardened lesbian roommate, a gay friend of Elizabeth's who's an intelligent wastrel, a smarmy German professor, and a gem and mineral dealer with an unhappy wife/assistant. The narrative technique involves the use of several different points of view. A given scene may allow the reader to see the same action from starkly contrasting points of view. This reinforces the overarching theme of the book, which is the unending difficulty of human communication. It is possible to sympathize with and condemn each of the book's dozen or so characters. Whether they elicit admiration or scorn from a given reader depends on the reader's own life experiences. There is no omniscient narrator, and no final judgment of the characters' actions and thoughts. At no point is the reader told what to think. First Chapter Online To read the first chapter of the book, click here. For a pdf version of the first chapter, click here. Fiction vs. Non-Fiction To read a summary of what's fiction and what's non-fiction in the novel, click here. Ordering the Book Who Else! Books in the Denver Book Mall sells Apart from You for $14/copy (that's $1.95 off the cover price) and will ship anywhere in the U.S. For shipping charges and other details, contact Nina Else at n.else@att.net or phone her at 303-733-3808. The store's address is 32 Broadway, Denver, Colorado 80203. If you prefer, you can order Apart from You from various online bookstores. Use these links: Amazon Barnes and Noble All Direct BooksAMillion BuyBooks.com Tattered Cover Wildside Press Or you can order Apart from You through any bookstore. Tell them to contact Ingram (the big distributor from whom bookstores order a lot of their books) and mention that this book comes through Ingram's Lightning Source division. Please note that this book is published by means of Print on Demand technology, so it won't be on the shelves at bookstores. You'll have to ask for it. Bookstore clerks are still a bit confused about this whole Print on Demand thing, but it's part of the publishing wave of the future, so eventually the bookstore personnel should be up to speed on it. (And if you encounter some who are still confused, please educate them! Click here to find more information on Print on Demand.) Contact I welcome comments from readers. You may contact me at leonore@csd.net or at leonore@dvorkin.com. The first is my current personal e-mail address and the latter is my permanent e-mail address. Thanks for reading all of this. I appreciate your interest.

See also:

Why I'm Glad I Had Breast Cancer (autobiographical) Business Secrets from the Stars (by David Dvorkin, humor/satire) Dawn Crescent (by David and Daniel Dvorkin, Gulf War One goes wrong) Pit Planet (by David Dvorkin, science fiction)