I was expecting something more like Flowers for Algernon, especially as the title character starts off with a PhD and as a tenured teacher at Harvard. If I was writing such a novel (and I still might), I'd do it that way. If you haven't read Flowers for Algernon, it's a story about a mouse named Algernon who is made incredibly smart, and then a human named Charlie who goes from basically mentally retarded to genius by the same process, and it's all told in journal form by Charlie. The unreliable narrator is a great tool when properly done.
I am proud to say that I did not cry, even when she got diagnosed, until page 111, when she started talking about butterflies. My dad loved butterflies long before (and after) his diagnosis, and we covered his memorial picture board in butterfly cut-outs.
I don't think, however, that Alice took me into any uncharted waters. They were all familiar. She can't find the bathroom and pees on herself and feels shame. She forgets one of her daughters. She makes mistakes at work and doesn't realize her poor performance. She was never violent like my dad, but that's rare. I expected more frustration and more control issues.
Two things did bother me, that were left hanging. She forgets to go to her support group meeting, and she can no longer deal with her e-mail to respond to her EOAD friends. It doesn't seem like anyone ever takes her to the meetings or that she ever talks to those people again. Then she leaves the suicide instruction document open on her computer and no one ever remarks on it or looks for her vial of sleeping pills.
I didn't like the character of her husband very much.
His refusal after a while to exercise with her, the whole Sloan-Kettering thing--he was a jerk. Their marriage felt fake. I never thought they loved each other, there was no passion. They never had sex--implied or implicit, offscreen or on. And I would think that's an important part of EOAD--do you still have sex?
As far as a character study of her, and of the disease, it was fairly brilliant, but all the other characters were flat, cutouts moving through her world, even when she is barely diagnosed and showing symptoms.
I would give this book 4 out of 5. It's really good, but it could have been amazing.
I was thinking about the book after I finished it, and how Alice is treated by her co-workers and friends after she admits to her diagnosis, and I realized that it would be better to lie to the world and say "I have a brain tumor." My great-uncle had a brain tumor that caused dementia and everyone rallied around him. My dad had plain old dementia and he was a pariah.
(book cover from Amazon, butterfly montage from www.mgcpuzzles.com--we used it on my dad's board)
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