Interestingly, what makes Eve's Apple work is what's missing from it- as if Rosen is restraining himself from the sort of literary hunger that makes other contemporary writers feel the need to over-write their characters. He doesn't include too many smaller characters or sub-plots and he keeps Joseph and Ruth well restrained- just enough to let our imaginations fill in the blanks. It's a novel full of characters who, like Prospero, exist on islands of their own exile and make up rules to instill order where they feel the misdirected routes of their lives have taken them. You leave Rosen's work with a sense not of the mystery of anorexia but of the mystery of the human condition and all the choices that people make to embrace and define themselves. Rosen himself is on an island too, it seems, inhabited only by those other few contemporary authors with such a good gift for storytelling.
