| Genre: Drama Main characters: Dr.Wilbur Larch, Homer Wells, Candy Kendall Summary: Dr. Wilbur Larch was spending his life running a little orphanage in St. Clouds, together with his two nurses, Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna. He was a firm believer in woman’s right to choose for herself so he occasionally performed abortions (even though it was illegal at the time). While he has dedicated all his life to his orphans, loving them all and trying to find them all adoptive parents as good as possible, Dr. Larch has become a especially attached to one of them, Homer Wells. He started teaching Homer medicine, and as the latter had a natural inclination for that he shortly mastered everything there was to know about obstretical procedures and more. Dr. Larch’s dream was to have Homer as his successor (although Homer declared he never wants to abort babies), so he encourages him to leave the orphanage when the occasion arises (hoping Homer will thus find someone who’ll pay his way through medical school). But Homer, once he has the choice realizes he never actually wants to be a doctor anyway, settling for working at an apple orchard instead. |
The characters were very well built in my opinion. Unfortunately I have found both Wally and Candy to be sort of cliche (the beautiful girl perfect in every way, torn between the love for the guy she knew since childhood and this new hero-type she just met; the beautiful guy perfect in every way, volunteering to fight for his country, presumed dead for a while but all this time kept alive by the memory of his girlfriend’s love and of his love for her), but all the others were plain great. My favorites have been by far Dr. Larch and his two nurses: all three devoting their life to doing good, to taking care of their orphans, to being “of use”, as Dr. Larch put it, all three getting older and older and frailer and frailer as the time went by but never giving up. Melony is sort of their opposite, a very destructive person, so much so that I have found her as a child quite disturbing. She used to scare me all throughout the book as I was certain she’ll end up doing some serious harm, but she sort of mellowed out at the end and I was actually glad to see her ending up happy at Lorna’s side.
I don’t know what to think about what the author has chosen to do out of Homer Wells. The reader gets the feeling at times (while Homer is living his nice apple-picking life) that he is wrong, he is wasting his life in compromising and denying his God-given talent. On one hand I like that because it makes Homer very much more human, very much more real, very much less than a character of a book. After all, so many people make bad choices, so many people with potential lived their lives in compromise and deceit, why wouldn’t such thing happen to Homer? The other hand, well, has to do with the idealist in me, the one that expects perfect things to happen at least in books if not in real life. I would have, of course, liked Homer to follow Dr. Larch’s footsteps from the very beginning. But then there would have been no book to talk about, right? :P
I have liked the way the story is somehow centered around rules, respected or broken (As Wally put it, “‘Some rules are good rules, kiddo,’ [...] ‘But some rules are just rules. You just got to break them carefully.’“). The rules (both legal and moral) about abortion, the rules written by Homer in the cider house (never read and thus never respected, people thought they were “something to do with the building’s electricity” as they were always tacked near the light switch), the rules of society, the rules the black apple pickers had between them, and, perhaps most of all, the rules Candy has once set for Homer (while in the cider house — I think these are the very rules that gave the novel its title), that “We share Angel,’ [...] ‘We both get to live with him. We get to be his family. Nobody ever moves out.’“, thus condemning Homer to a life of compromise, a life of lying to an invalid, a life of always wanting what he couldn’t have.
I think the abortion-related part has been handled quite well by Irving, as he lets the reader see both parts of the problem: not bringing unwanted children into the world versus the belief the fetus has a soul ever since conception. He does (obviously) lean towards one of the sides (and what’s more all characters agree that women should have the right to choose what’s best for them), but all in all I feel he has touched every important issue related to the matter — I liked that as I am fond of watching things from more than one angle :)
What I liked most: A moment that I was really touched by was when Candy has pregnant and was waiting to give birth at the orphanage, and everyone there was enchanted by her, especially the nurses: “we’re gonna have a wanted baby!”. It sort of tells a lot about the world they were all living in, a world where pregnancy was associated only with guilt, suffering and abandonment one way or the other.
Also, I was fascinated by Dr. Larch’s plan of reviving Fuzzy and making him a proper doctor, how detailed and complicated it was (all the correspondence Dr. Larch imagined, for once), how many years it spanned (over fifteen), how well everything was planned and how well it luckily turned out. Isn’t it interesting how easy to manipulate history is (history, who is supposed to be absolute), once someone puts his mind to it?
What I liked least: Many things were predictable but all in all it was too interesting a book to let that stand in the way of enjoying it.
Recommend it? Definitely. I find it a very well written book.
Written by the same author:
The World According to Garp
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