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Ambivalence, A Love Story: Portrait of a Marriage »

Book cover image of Ambivalence, A Love Story: Portrait of a Marriage by John Donatich

Authors: John Donatich
ISBN-13: 9780312326531, ISBN-10: 031232653X
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Date Published: January 2005
Edition: (Non-applicable)

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Author Biography: John Donatich

John Donatich is currently Director of Yale University Press. His work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, The Nation, The Village Voice and other publications. He lives in New Haven, CT with his wife, Betsy Lerner and their daughter, Raffaella.

Book Synopsis

Praise for Ambivalence

"A poignant self-portrait of what we rightly call 'a family man'. At certain eloquent moments it carried me inexorably to my own experience, and provided illumination. By touching so sensitively on the communal, it consoles in a finer tone."

- Harold Bloom

"Both in its general assertions and particular instance, this is a riveting book. And an original one. John Donatich admits to and explores the many aspects of Ambivalence, and he does so with intelligence and wit."

- Nicholas Delbanco

"There is no ambivalence in my response to this radiant work of story-telling. Its beauty of expression and familiarity of emotion and experience are John Donatich's gift to his readers, who just may recognize bits of themselves between its beautifully crafted lines."

- Sherwin Nuland

Kirkus Reviews

Impending fatherhood takes publishing executive Donatich into an exploratory thicket of thoughts, concerns, and ideas. In fluid and easy-reading prose, even though the author wears his erudition on his sleeve with apt quotes from a panoply of writers, Donatich, in a purely subjective and self-interrogative way, expresses his thoughts on becoming a father. "The predicaments of manhood" become immediately clear when Donatich gets fired from his job just eight hours after his wife gives birth (he's now the director of Yale University Press; she's the literary agent Betsy Lerner). Donatich gathers that "fatherhood calls for indulgence and dependence as well as discipline and providing" and that "the new father must learn to position himself next to his child's day-to-day life, instead of its iconic markers." This awareness sends him back in thought to the world of his immigrant family and to his own youth of peculiarities and cultishness: "imperial, competitive, proud, territorial, politically incorrect. . . very much like a religion. The very qualities that embarrassed me as a kid now seem a privilege." Nothing here is mawkish, though, and Donatich is as hard on his upbringing as he is on his presumptions to the demands of fatherhood: "more complex than uncertainty, less adventurous than dissidence, ambivalence is a mode of being contrary that has neither the credulity of rebellion nor the alibi of cynicism." After the miscarriages and the breakdowns, he writes convincingly of striving to be the brick, the stabilizer, the heater in the basement whose cycles provide warmth. Acceptance is bittersweet, "a deliberate tolerance for the dull ache of long-term loving." But once he gets the firstwhiff of his daughter, all else but her becomes a moot point. A father in the making who's Spock-like as he hews to the intuitive, though the intuition is informed by Neruda and Emerson, Kirkegaard and Walter Benjamin, the tragicomic ironists of old Eastern Europe-and the sheer pleasure of Marvin Gaye. Agent: Tina Bennett/Janklow & Nesbit

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