Papa's Cord : A Novel

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Willis's debut novel investigates the life, loves, moral dilemmas and family ties of plucky Jewish New Yorker Josie Davidovitch. Josie grows from the saucy '60s daughter of an elegant mother and domineering Manhattan gynecologist father into an ambitious wife and careerwoman. The young heroine enjoys, and suffers, an uncommonly candid relationship with her father, who's beloved by his patients but is a bully at home, and who bombards his teenaged daughter with clinical information about sex. He decides that Josie should have her first pelvic exam at 13, a traumatizing experience that is partly responsible for Josie's need to keep many sexual secrets: losing her virginity in her parents' bed, sex in her father's office, an abortion. Vague prose outlines Josie's high school and college days, fast-forwarding to her romance and engagement to the charming athlete Gus Housman, who becomes a paraplegic after a swimming accident. Josie marries him despite her parents' advice and life takes an unexpected turn: their romantic, against-all-odds story is published as a his 'n' hers memoir, and a Hollywood producer commissions a screenplay. With Gus now a successful media executive, and their thwarted hopes for a family about to be fulfilled, Josie must face her father's sudden illness and deep depression, which propels her to greater understanding of her family's emotional heritage. Willis deftly portrays the post-Doris Day/pre-Gloria Steinem era and humanizes the Jewish princess clich and its formative father figure. Despite the author's valiant effort to dissect a complex father-daughter relationship, stereotype triumphs over depth as the heroine acquires material wealth, worldly success and guilt. Tender passages (like Gus's fond childhood memories of Brooklyn or Josie peeking in at her father at work) are undermined by the heroine's impertinent Hollywood wheeling and dealing, her hopes that she and Gus will become the next "Diana and Lionel Trilling," and her sneaky secret about her child's paternity. Readers should enjoy the lucid descriptions of New York life, and will most likely find that adolescent Josie is a more convincing take-charge protagonist than her striving adult counterpart. Agent, Jonathon Lazear. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Smart but spoiled, Josie Davidovitch grows up in the 1950s in a somewhat dysfunctional upper-middle-class New York Jewish family. Her authoritarian father is the famous Doctor D., a gynecologist/obstetrician beloved by his female patients but a tyrant at home. Josie's mother is the conciliator, trying to keep the peace in the family. Josie is obsessed with sex and longs for Mr. Right to come along and release her from the constraints of the parental apartment. She finds her man, but he breaks his back in a swimming accident before the wedding. Much to her parents' dismay, Josie plunges ahead, marries, and heads for Hollywood with her husband to write a screenplay about the accident. "None of this was real. It was surreal," Josie muses upon viewing the film--an example of this first novel's pedestrian prose. Josie's attempts to have a baby become paramount; she is finally released from "Papa's cord" upon his death. Stereotypic portrayals of Jews and a superficial cast to the story leave much to be desired here.--Molly Abramowitz, Silver Spring, MD Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A lugubrious first novel describing the slow coming of age of a Jewish-American Princess in Manhattan during the 1960s and '70s. Josie Davidovich has the misfortune to grow up along the frontier separating two very different epochs. A daughter of the baby boom, she's raised in a prosperous if rather starchy Jewish family on the Upper East Side. Her father, a successful gynecologist, is progressive enough to explain (and prescribe) oral contraceptives for her as a teenager, but she's still expected—and, more or less, expects herself—to meet a nice German Jew at dancing school and settle down to a life of cozy domesticity. The world she is raised for, though, no longer exists by the time she's old enough to claim it, and so Josie ends up as a researcher at a midtown magazine in the late '60s. Through her business contacts, she meets and falls in love with Gus Housman, a divorced midwesterner who abandoned architecture to become a documentary filmmaker and has ended up in New York working for CBS. Although Gus is ten years her senior, Josie decides that he's the man for her. She announces their engagement and sets about planning the perfect wedding. Before it goes off, however, tragedy strikes when Gus breaks his back in a swimming accident. Josie's family urge her to break off the relationship—what hope of happiness is there in a marriage to a paralytic?—but Josie refuses to abandon Gus. After much hardship, the two succeed in their careers (Gus launches a cable network, Josie produces TV documentaries) and also in their private life, when Josie becomes pregnant. But lurking in the shadow of Josie's hard-earned happiness is an ugly shadow from her father's past. Aliterate soap opera, decently done but unremarkable.