No Ordinary Matter

by Jenny McPhee

Book Overview

Jenny McPhee's critically acclaimed debut, The Center of Things, was hailed by O, The Oprah Magazine as "a smart novel of love, lust, and life's miraculous randomness." The New York Times Book Review... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0743260724
• ISBN13: 9780743260725
• Release Date: May 2004
• Publisher: Free Press
• Length: 259 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.7" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

Hidden insights sparkle through prose

This book is excellent. The plot line involves two sisters--one a doctor, one a writer for a soap opera. The book is soap opera-like itself, with improbable twist and turns, and characters alternatly flat and round. I found this to be humorous. There's a line in the book: "the intolerable can only be spoken when it becomes tolerable." (or something like this.) How true and succint! I love this author. Her wrtting moves along at a deliberate walk, giving you time to reflect. It's unhurried, yet easy to read. I think about her last book The Center of Things often--the key idea there is the idea of what we use to distract ourselves from issues we haven't faced yet. Her stories have given me insight to my own life, yet feel light and skimmy. I can't wait for another novel. Thanks Ms. McPhee.

"An audience does not expect a story to be literal."

As soon as Veronica Moore, a scriptwriter for the long-running daytime drama, "Ordinary Matters," meets Alex, a new actor on the show, she is smitten, and their mutual attraction soon blossoms. There's only one problem. Alex is the unsuspecting father of her sister Lillian's unborn baby. Lillian, with both an MD and a PhD in neuroscience, has found her biological clock ticking and no prospective husband on the horizon. After glimpsing Alex at a bar, she has deemed him a suitable sperm donor, taken him back to the apartment, and afterward dismissed him, planning never to see him again. As the story alternates between the present and the past, showing the Moores' bizarre family history, the story of Veronica and Lillian grows in depth and complexity. Their lives soon become more outrageous than anything Veronica ever dreamed up in a script. Every melodramatic cliche comes true in this plot--characters have hidden pasts, love goes wrong, a private investigator uncovers secrets, families are brought together and then pulled apart, "dead" people come to life, and people's remembrances prove faulty. Plot-wise, this is as over-the-top as any romance or melodrama you may ever read. McPhee is a unique and surprising writer, however, with a firm grounding in science. She presents her wild plot not for its own sake or for sensationalism, but to illustrate true science, which underlies all behavior, even bizarre behavior. The soap opera-like plot combines with elements of biology and neurobiology, including details of Lillian's pregnancy, the neurology of the senses, the "neurobiology of humor," the physiology and neurology of the brain, and the meaning of consciousness. A dominant theme is the inability of humans to predict events that can either open their lives to new opportunities or destroy their hopes. Though the mixing of elaborate melodrama with pure science may seem strange, McPhee is largely successful, but the hard science within the novel requires explication, which she provides. This creates an analytical, objective tone, inimical to character development, since characters do not develop through their actions when both the characters and actions are used to illustrate specific (scientific) ideas. Although Alex remarks that "an audience does not expect a story to be literal," Veronica's comments may be more appropriate: "It wasn't that she felt manipulated, it was that she hadn't been manipulated well enough." This reader wished that the novel had manipulated her just a bit more effectively, but it is still great fun to read, often humorous, and full of ironies--and that, of course, is "no ordinary matter." Mary Whipple

Absolutely Fabulous

"...in this world the extraordinary was commonplace." Those are words that appear in this brilliant novel, and they describe the world inhabited by the characters invented by Jenny McPhee. Muriel Spark said it best: "A daring and charming book."

"An audience does not expect a story to be literal."

As soon as Veronica Moore, a scriptwriter for the long-running daytime drama, "Ordinary Matters," meets Alex, a new actor on the show, she is smitten, and their mutual attraction soon blossoms. There's only one problem. Alex is the unsuspecting father of her sister Lillian's unborn baby. Lillian, with both an MD and a PhD in neuroscience, has found her biological clock ticking and no prospective husband on the horizon. After glimpsing Alex at a bar, she has deemed him a suitable sperm donor, taken him back to the apartment, and then dismissed him, planning never to see him again. As the story alternates between the present and the past, showing the Moores' bizarre family history, the story of Veronica and Lillian grows in depth and complexity. Their lives soon become more outrageous than anything Veronica ever dreamed up in a script. Every melodramatic cliche comes true in this plot--characters have hidden pasts, love goes wrong, a private investigator uncovers secrets, families are brought together and then pulled apart, "dead" people come to life, and people's remembrances prove faulty. Plot-wise, this is as over-the-top as any romance or melodrama you may ever read.McPhee is a unique and surprising writer, however, with a firm grounding in science. She presents her wild plot not for its own sake or for sensationalism, but to illustrate true science, which underlies all behavior, even bizarre behavior. The soap opera-like plot combines with elements of biology and neurobiology, including details of Lillian's pregnancy, the neurology of the senses, the "neurobiology of humor," the physiology and neurology of the brain, and the meaning of consciousness. A dominant theme is the inability of humans to predict events that can either open their lives to new opportunities or destroy their hopes.Though the mixing of elaborate melodrama with pure science may seem strange, McPhee is largely successful, but the hard science within the novel requires explication. This creates an analytical, objective tone, inimical to character development, since characters do not develop through their actions when both the characters and actions are used to illustrate specific (scientific) ideas. Although Alex remarks that "an audience does not expect a story to be literal," Veronica's comments may be more appropriate: "It wasn't that she felt manipulated, it was that she hadn't been manipulated well enough. " This reader wished that the novel had manipulated her just a bit more effectively, but it is still great fun to read, often humorous, and full of ironies--and that, of course, is "no ordinary matter." Mary Whipple

Better than first one by McPhee

Flabbergasting, overwhelming, airy & dense. There's no novels like her novels!