Black and Blue: A Novel

Black and Blue by Anna QuindlenA novel about an abused woman's path to freedom, BLACK AND BLUE introduces us to the world of Fran Benedetto, a woman who is beaten and emotionally abused every day by the only man she's ever loved, her husband Bobby.Fran lives day by day in a type of fear that can't even be described. A wrong word or a wrong look - anything could set off Bobby's anger. A broken nose or a black eye -- Bobby lashes out at Fran in any way he can. It seems to start out as a mistake, a fluke, but as the years go by, Bobby continues to beat Fran for the slightest thing, and does not see anything wrong in what he does to her.The fact that Bobby is a policeman makes this a scarier ordeal for Fran. Bobby knows that even if Fran goes to the police, no one would believe that he had beaten up his own wife. His reputation on the force seems to be legendary. On the other hand, if Fran did try to go to the police, no one could protect her from his wrath after finding out what she did.Fran keeps these abuses and fears to herself. Her son Robert asks Fran, "how did that happen?" when he sees her with a black eye. Fran always has an answer, always avoids telling him the truth. And Robert looks the other way. Although old enough to understand what is happening, he is still too young to want to accept such a thing happening between his parents. So he chooses to pretend that everything is ok.Fran could only take so much abuse. She takes their son Robert and leaves for Florida under the guidance of Patty Bancroft, a leader of a group that helps battered women like Fran by relocating them with a whole new identity, saving them from the men that are abusing them. Fran starts a new life with a new name, and slowly things begin to fall in to place. But, no matter what Patty tells her, Fran feels that Bobby will one day find them. And when he does, Fran knows her life is over.BLACK AND BLUE was one of those books that kept me glued to every page. What surprised me is that I did not cry once or feel any real strong emotions while I read this book except for fear. The book for me was more like a suspense novel, and secondarily a novel about spousal abuse. The author focused more on Fran's attempt to forge a new life for herself and her son and on her every day fears that Bobby would eventually find her. With that said, I highly enjoyed this book and would definitely recommend it. It was an Oprah Selection, but for me it was not as typical a choice as some of her past books.

Many of us who love Lolita have its unforgettable first lines committed to memory: "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three..." Using exquisite prose, Nabokov sketches in an extremely compelling manner the profile of a pedophile and his victim. Unlike many other psychological novels, he doesn't turn tragedy into redemption and pathology into love. There's nothing redeeming or redeemable about the sociopathic pedophile and his sick love for Lolita.Anna Quindlen's Black and Blue follows in Lolita`s footsteps as a great work of psychological fiction. Psychological, because the author sketches in such a realistic fashion the profile of the abuser that I'm tempted to say her novel should be available in every domestic violence shelter under the category of "nonfiction." And yet, one can't forget that Black and Blue is above all a work of fiction, masterfully crafted. Its beginning echoes the first lines of Lolita, in fact, the novel which it resembles in style even more than in content:"The first time my husband hit me I was nineteen years old. One sentence and I'm lost. One sentence and I can hear his voice in my head, that butterscotch-syrup voice that made goose bumps rise on my arms when I was young, that turned all of my skin warm and alive with a sibilant S, the drawling vowels, its shocking fricatives. It always sounded like a whisper, the way he talked, the intimacy of it, the way the words seemed to go into your gutys, your head, your heart." (1)The message of Black and Blue is similar to that of nonfiction books on dangerous men, which attempt to educate the public and empower the victims. Abusers are often charming. Abusers don't usually begin intimate relationships with overt abuse. Abusers can be entrancing and romantic, at least at first, during the wooing phase. Abuse doesn't get better; it escalates. Abusers push the limits of their victims' tolerance, little by little, until they dominate their targets. Abuse is above all a power game. The abusers are generally narcissistic individuals who lack empathy and want total control. The victims, however, aren't necessarily weak or passive. They can be strong and loving men and women, like Frannie Benedetto. Abuse is a tragedy without a silver lining.It's one thing to read this familiar message in self-help books and pamphlets and quite another to feel it in a great work of fiction. From the very first lines, Black and Blue gets under your skin. It reveals the mindset of both abuser and abused. It traces the emotional scars of the child or children who have to endure these sad family dynamics. "My son scarcely ever cries. And his smile comes so seldom that it's like bright sunshine on winter snow, blinding and strange." (26) Such beautiful language for such ugly facts... Perhaps this is the best way to bring the abuse to life for others. Above all, Black and Blue puts you in the shoes of all those who have the courage to run away from it without ever looking back.Claudia Moscovici, Notablewriters.com

Three and a half stars.More than anything, this book did a lot to clarify for me the difference between genre fiction and literary fiction. Genre fiction is prolific and sloppy in its details--putting color in the writing for the sake of color, rather than for the sake of writing. A perfect example is the description of the dinners the narrator and her husband used to have at their favorite restaurant, enjoying each other's company, with tears of laughter "falling into our shrimp fra diavolo." Any competent editor would have asked: "What significance does this dish have? Do you intend to imply that this is the only meal they ever eat, because as written, this is what they have every time they're together." But no, it's just there, a meaningless detail for the sake of detail rather than in service of the story or the characters.Things like that are irksome enough without the completely unbelievable ending of the story, which I won't go into partly because of spoilers and partly because I just don't care enough about this book to spend time on it. But trust me: the ending falls into the WTF? category.Where the book sort of succeeds is in giving a kind-of glimpse into why the hell women have children with partners whom they know to be abusive, terrible people. Fran Benedetto's first-person narrative gives some credible insight regarding where the partner of an abuser might be coming from, as far as the fact that the partner cannot possibly be thinking straight. But that small benefit doesn't compensate for the book's many failures of story and writing, in this reader's opinion.

Please note that this is a review for Anna Quindlen's Black and Blue, not a book by James Patterson - Amazon have done one of their strange link-ups here! So don't just give it a negative vote for not being for the Patterson book, please - I can't find any other way to write a review for the Quindlen.'Black and Blue' is the story of Frances (Fran) Benedetto. On the surface a successful nurse with a handsome policeman husband and adorable son whose Italian heritage also makes him very handsome, Fran is actually the victim of appalling physical abuse from her husband Bobby. Bobby's job as a policeman and her fear that she'll lose their son Robert puts her off reporting her injuries - but after Bobby breaks her nose, Fran eventually decides enough is enough, and contacts a mysterious woman who runs an 'underground' service for battered wives. This woman, Patty, gets Fran and Robert out of New York and finds them new identities as 'Beth and Robert Crayshaw' in a small town in Florida. She even gets 'Beth' a job as a care assistant and an apartment. Fran is reassured that all will be well as long as she follows Patty's instructions, and never contacts anyone from her past life. But losing everyone from her past - particularly her beloved sister Grace - is not so easy for Fran to do, even though she begins to make new friends, including PE teacher Mike, and Avon Lady Cindy. As for Robert, who never knew the worst of his mother's story, he's horribly torn between loyalty to his mother and a fierce desire to see his father again - something that will have terrible consequences....Anna Quindlen is one of those writers that I admire but have never found really engrossing - and I'm not sure why. Her plots are well constructed, her characters on the whole quite interesting - and yet there's always something intangible that prevents me really caring about her protagonists and getting involved in their stories. Perhaps it is that she has something of the same quality as Ann Tyler (whose work I really don't like on the whole) and is so keen to create 'ordinary' American characters that they actually come across at times as quite bland.This novel I definitely thought was one of her better ones - but I'd have liked it more, I think, if I hadn't read a much better novel about domestic abuse written around the same time, Anita Shreve's 'Strange Fits of Passion'. Shreve's got a bit more commercial recently, but this novel was written when she was in her more 'literary' and less self-conscious early stages as a writer, and I thought it was remarkably intelligent - about why a woman would let her husband abuse her, how she would react towards both him and their child, the long-term effects of abuse, and how she would make a new life in a small community. Compared to Shreve's Maureen, who is always asking herself why she's let her situation get as bad as it did, Fran seems for the most part oddly passive (so much so that I wonder how she actually manages to go ahead with her escape plan). She lets Bobby abuse her for years, never really seeming to question why this is - at least Shreve provided the abusive husband Harold in her novel with a past that explained if not excused his appalling behaviour. When she eventually does escape, it's only through letting Patty run her life almost as much as Bobby did, with Fran again going along passively with everything suggested. She never appears to think that Robert may eventually put her in danger - though it's clear from the start that this is likely. There was a sense throughout, however likeable and pitiable Fran was, of a woman who easily fell into the roles of being pushed around and letting other people run her. And other than Bobby - who had a real feel of danger but also of charisma about him - and in some parts of the book Robert - whose split loyalties made agonizing reading, even if he appeared to forget about them for long periods - the other characters were for the most part not all that interesting (unlike the wonderful Maine villagers in 'Strange Fits of Passion'). Mike was a cardboard cut-out 'Mr Nice Guy' and his romance with Fran predictable, unlike the much more romantic one between Jack and Maureen in Shreve's book, Cindy a stereotyped 'nice mummy type', Grace a simple 'opposite' to Frances (feisty, unmarried, intellectual), Patty (bossy and domineering) and so on - though the elderly Jewish lady Mrs Irving had her loveable episodes, certainly. So while I did read the book with some pleasure, I found myself always comparing it to the Shreve, and also switching off during the long Thanksgiving dinners, make-up sessions, periods of girly gossip etc etc.There were good things about this book - Fran's angst-ridden meditations about what had gone wrong with her life and her tenderness (mutual) for Grace, the spine-chilling final sections (with a bit of a twist to the tale), the descriptions of Fran's nursing job. And Quindlen does offer some interesting meditations on the lack of protection that battered wives get - or got in the 1990s - in America, and on how a rather ordinary and shy woman might react to such a marriage. But the lack of real investigation into psychological motivation, and the tendency of the minor characters to all drift into rather bland American stereotypes mean that I was always comparing it unfavourably with Shreve's wonderful book, one of the best on abuse that there is. Still - worth a read.Three and a half stars.

This is the third Anna Qindlen novel I've read and it didn't disappoint - though, being a survivor of domestic violence myself, it was a difficult read. The basic premise of the story is that Fran, after 18 years of a violent marriage, is helped to leave by a group who run a kind of victim protection scheme. She and her son are given new names, moved thousands of miles and given support to start their lives again in an anonymous Florida suburb. Life at first is strange, but gradually, in her new identity as Beth, Fran and her son Robert start to rebuild their Ives, make friends and settle in. But always in the background is the shadow of Fran's husband Bobbie...What comes across most strongly in the novel is the sense of foreboding, the sense that Beth is always looking over her shoulder, always checking the crowds for that familiar face, always holding her breath before she answers the phone or opens the door in case in case in case... We see Beth make new friends, start a new career, dally with a new relationship but there's always the feeling that this new life is a fragile one and it will only take one phone call or one slip of the tongue to bring everything crashing down around her. I know that feeling only too well. Even though my own circumstances in leaving a domestic relationship were very different, I know only too well that sense of having to be careful, having to watch what you do, what you say, where you go, who you see. It's not a nice feeling, it leaves you feeling paranoid and shaky, and that feeling came over loud and clear through Quindlen's beautiful prose.And then there's Robert, Fran's beloved son. He's been brought up in a violent home and although his father never hit him, he's seen the damage. And yet he loves his father, idolises his father and though he understands why they left, he never quite gets why they have to stay away.Add to this a group of supportive and interesting characters - Cindy, who has her own dark secret; the caring PE teacher Mike; Mrs Levett, and her wheezing, comatose husband. Together they paint a rich portrait of a flimsy life built on half truths and lies - where you know the true story is just around the corner.Most books have a happy ending, but not this one. Well in some ways it's happy, but it also left me sobbing for the life that could have been.A challenging, wonderful, poetic beauty of a book.

I love Ann Quindlen's writing. While I enjoyed this title, it is not her best; it's as though she had the idea and did not know where to go with it. The minor characters were incidentally drawn, and some relationships stereotypical. However, Anna Quindlen is a very readable, emotionally empathetic and accessible author.

I could not put this book down. beautifully written and i went through every emotion with Fran on her journey.the ending was quite unexpected which made a change from other stories where you can normally see how its going to end. thoroughly recommended.

While the author succeeds in writing a interesting tale about a tough subject matter, I felt the story was not as gripping it could have been and the character development left something to be desired.