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Summary
Summary
A luminous and insightful novel that considers the moral complexities of scientific discovery and the sustaining nature of love. A young researcher at MIT, Jane Weiss is obsessed with finding the genetic marker for Valentine's Disease, a neurodegenerative disorder. Her pursuit is deeply personal--Valentine's killed her mother, and she and her freewheeling sister, Laurel, could be genetic carriers; each has a fifty percent chance of developing the disease. Having seen firsthand the devastating effect Valentine's had on her parents' marriage, Jane is terrified she might become a burden on whomever she falls in love with and so steers clear of romantic entanglement. Then, the summer before her father's second wedding, Jane falls hard for her future stepbrother, Willie. But Willie's father also died from Valentine's, raising the odds that their love will end in tragedy.
When Willie bolts at a crucial moment in their relationship, Jane becomes obsessed with finding the genetic marker to the disease that threatens both their families. But if she succeeds in making history, will she and her sister have the courage to face the truth this newfound knowledge could hold for their lives? A Perfect Life is a novel of scientific and self discovery, about learning how to embrace life and love, no matter what may come. Eileen Pollack conjures a thought-provoking, emotionally resonant story of one woman's brilliance and bravery as she confronts her deepest fears and desires--and comes to accept the inevitable and the unexpected.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In her third novel, Pollack (Breaking and Entering) delivers an absorbing genetic mystery that is couched in a complicated love story and a tale of survival. Jane Weiss, a researcher at MIT, is on a tireless hunt after the genetic marker for a neurodegenerative disease (a thinly veiled fictionalization of Huntington's disease called Valentine's chorea) that killed her mother and now looms over her own life and that of her sister. Fear and dread drive her relentless work so that there's little time for romance-until she crosses paths with a man who also happens to be at risk for the disease. Love, sex, and marriage represent risks Jane isn't willing to take, not knowing whether she's going to succumb to Valentine's chorea and pass the gene on to potential children. When she's surprised by love-and certain discoveries in the lab-she must grapple with what it means to live and love fully in the face of risk and loss. If some lesser characters seem stock and certain story lines occasionally drag, the novel is redeemed by its clean prose and memorable protagonists. Pollack's combination of gritty romance and medical suspense will have readers thinking about mortality and the bonds of family long after finishing. Agent: Jenni Ferrari-Adler, Union Literary. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Jane Weiss, a research scientist at MIT, investigates the genetic makeup of a neurodegenerative disease, a quest made more urgent because her mother died of the disease and Jane herself has a 50 percent chance of having it. Both Jane and her sister, Laurel, have developed strategies to deal with the possibility that Valentine disease (in many ways similar to Huntington's) might be in their future. Laurel lives for the momentshe is completely uninterested in making plans, and she lives life on the edge, taking risks and spending profligately. Jane, by contrast, lives the life of a dedicated, even obsessed, scientist, bent on discovering the genetic mystery of the disease that killed her mother. Jane's father, Herb, is president of the Institute for Valentine's Research, a philanthropy he founded as his wife was dying, and he's getting ready to marry Honey Land, chairwoman of the Valentine's Disease Society, whose husband also died of the diseaseand here the medical issues thicken, for when Jane meets Willie, Honey's son, they begin to fall in love, a potential disaster from a genetics point of view, for any children they have would have a 75 percent chance of carrying the Valentine's gene. Jane eventually and dramatically finds a marker on the gene for Valentine's, giving rise to personal and ethical dilemmasshould she take the blood test she developed to see if she will get the disease? Should Willie? Should Laurel? What knowledge should we have, what knowledge do we really want, and how should that knowledge shape the choices we make in our lives? Pollack expertly and sensitively focuses on the nuances of ambivalence and on the human dilemma of what to do in the complex ethical situations that arise from genetic research. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Jane and her sister, Laurel Weiss, live with a sword hanging over their heads: the possibility they have inherited the gene for Valentine's disease, a rare and incurable neurodegenerative genetic disorder that took their mother in her prime. Jane, a scientist at MIT, is determined to find a test that will determine if someone is a carrier, while Laurel takes bold risks, worried that the disease will end her days prematurely. But life and love have other plans for both sisters as each wrestles with unexpected relationships and complicated outcomes. The story occasionally feels overplotted and contrived, but Pollack (The Only Woman in the Room, 2015), a scientist, is on solid ground when she explores the morality of genetics testing and its attendant dilemmas. Jane's agony about whether she should get tested for Valentine's is convincing and feels earned. As crippling as doubt was, to live without hope might be even more paralyzing, she remarks, astutely capturing the complexities of living in the shadow of a specter beyond your control.--Apte, Poornima Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE LOST TIME ACCIDENTS, by John Wray. (Picador, $18.) In early 20th-century Vienna, a physicist makes a groundbreaking discovery that reverberates through his descendants' lives. The novel leaps across the century to his heirs - including an unremarkable scientist and a pulp science fiction author - and lands on Waldy Tolliver, his great-grandson, who realizes one morning that he has been "excused" from the course of normal time. A PERFECT LIFE, by Eileen Pollack. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $15.99.) Jane Weiss, a scientist at M.I.T. and this novel's central character, has devoted herself to investigating Valentine's disease, a neurogenerative disorder. Her research is motivated by personal tragedy - her mother died of the disease, and there's a 50 percent chance that Jane has it, too - but the story's heft comes from Jane's vocational mastery. MOTHERS, TELL YOUR DAUGHTERS: Stories, by Bonnie Jo Campbell. (Norton, $14.95.) The women here carve out refuges for themselves and one another in brutal circumstances; in the title story, a woman unable to speak after a stroke tries to communicate with one of her children. The tales drill down "to hidden depths of feeling and being, to reservoirs of strength and power that these women hardly know are there," our reviewer, Emily Eakin, wrote. UNITED STATES OF JIHAD: Who Are America's Homegrown Terrorists, and How Do We Stop Them?, by Peter Bergen. (Broadway, $17.) The author, CNN's national security analyst, offers a guide to domestic radicalism post-Sept. 11, looking at why some Americans become jihadists; how society has been shaped by the threat; and the government's (often contentious) response. Our reviewer, the former Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano, called this "the best one-volume treatment available on the current state of jihad in America." THE YEAR OF LEAR: Shakespeare in 1606, by James Shapiro. (Simon & Schuster, $18.) A turbulent year in England's political history turned out to be potent creative fodder for three of Shakespeare's greatest plays: "King Lear," "Macbeth" and "Antony and Cleopatra." Keenly aware of the fears and cultural upheavals of the time, Shakespeare translated the era's concerns into enduring, universal works. IN OTHER WORDS, by Jhumpa Lahiri. Translated by Ann Goldstein. (Vintage, $16.) Motivated by a longstanding love for Italian, Lahiri, who won a Pulitzer for her story collection "Interpreter of Maladies," chose to put aside writing in English altogether. These essays chronicle her self-imposed exile, from the physical aspects of her move to Rome, to the literary alienation and self-discovery that accompanies working in a new language. ?