Product Description

Sometimes those who have the most seem bent on throwing it away. Meet Bob Sterling, a comfortable middle-aged professor, a specialist in the life of Edgar Allan Poe, married to a former student with whom he has a young son. In the space of a week his family, marriage, home, career, sanity, and life are brought to the brink of ruin in the aftermath of a trip he makes with a student, the intense young poet Sienna Chu, who brings to life Bob’s long-harbored sexual fetish. Add to the mix the misadventures of his wife’s mentally failing mother and Sienna’s explosive techno-junkie roommate, and you have Alan Cumyn’s strikingly accomplished novel Losing It.

Whether describing an Alzheimer sufferer, a fetishist, a twisted poet, or a young mother whose life is suddenly spinning out of control, Cumyn reveals the eccentric sub-surfaces of our lives. Poignant, gritty, and tantalizingly erotic, Losing It is a high-wire act that plays out as an irresistible blend of darkness and humor.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #172100 in Books
• Published on: 2003-01-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 384 pages

From Publishers Weekly
It takes only a week for the Sterling household to crumble and collapse in Canadian writer Cumyn's first novel to be published in the U.S. The Sterlings are ordinary members of the educated middle class living in Ottawa, but turmoil lurks beneath their surface calm. Bob Sterling, a professor of literature specializing in Edgar Allan Poe, is secretly obsessed with women's underthings; Julia, Bob's much younger wife and former student, is quietly losing her mind from the exhaustion of caring for Matthew, their two-year-old, and her mother, Lenore, who is tormented by Alzheimer's. Lenore's illness and Bob's lechery cause the fall of the house of Sterling, both literally (Lenore, under the delusion that she is in prison, starts a fire and burns down the house) and figuratively. Bob gets involved with Sienna Chu, a long-legged coed who exudes erotic promise and writes incomprehensible verse, and is coaxed by her into donning female lingerie and a red dress in his office. Even more foolishly, Bob lets Sienna photograph him, an obviously risky act in the age of the Internet, as Bob soon discovers. Cumyn moves his story along briskly, leaping from one perspective to another. His skill with voices is akin to mimicry: he can transition from Lenore's Bosch-like inner life to Bob's seedier consciousness without a false step. The result is an unclassifiable novel that possesses the precision of a mathematical theorem, the hilarity of a Marx Brother's skit and the pathos of confession.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Shades of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, Cumyn's darkly comic novel is the story of a family in meltdown. Julia Sterling, sleep-deprived slave to her demanding, still-nursing, two-year-old son and to her Alzheimer's-stricken mother, is "losing it." Julia's mother, Lenore, is losing it big time, as Alzheimer's both dispatches and confuses her present and past. And Julia's husband, a college professor, is about to lose everything, as he gives in to an attraction for an undergraduate and to the fulfillment of a rather kinky fetish. Propelled along by Julia's, Lenore's, and Bob's perspectives, as well as that of a former high school classmate of Julia who still pines after her, the story never seems as bizarre as the individual incidents: Lenore's escapades outside the nursing home, Bob's all-too-public "outing" on the Internet, the ensuing chaos after fire destroys Julia and Bob's home, and Bob's pitiful machinations to keep Julia in the dark about his fetish. Like Cumyn's Burridge Unbound (2000), a winner of the Ottawa Book Award, and The Corrections, this is an exceptional, affecting work that belongs in most fiction collections.
Francine Fialkoff, "Library Journal"
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Watch Ottawa-based Poe scholar Bob Sterling, preoccupied with the conquest of a nubile female student and absorbed with acting out a long submerged sexual fetish, lurch from disaster to disaster. Caught up in his riotous wake are Julia, Bob's second wife and former student; Lenor, Julia's mother; Sienn, the object of Bob's current quest; and, Donn, a former schoolmate of Julia's. Cumyn's tour de force owes much of its success to plotting that keeps you turning pages even if you don't love the characters. The story revolves around the two characters who really are losing it--Bob to sexual obsession and Lenore to Alzheimer's disease--and demonstrates the power of psychic deterioration to devastate the lives of others. The nuanced, persuasive characterization propels the story forward and provides depth and texture. The professor's sexual obsessions and his mother-in-law's rapid descent into dementia are painful, fascinating, and convincing. A bonus is that Cumyn spices up this essentially sad story with some horrifyingly funny scenes. Those who like their fiction dark and erotic need look no further. Ellen Loughran
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Great book
I gulped this book down in two midnight sessions, to the detriment of my productivity the next days.

Why was I so fascinated by it, and why could I not stop reading it? I think it was the author's probing into the minds of these apparently normal (well, except the mother) people who were all, in their own ways, totally losing it.

The descriptions of the mother, who has advanced Alzheimers, were brilliantly done, but I guess I have to admit they got a bit old as time went on. Mania can be pretty boring. But there weren't so many of those anyway.

Bob was brilliantly funny. We all have our secret fantasies, and it was nice to be plunged into the weirdness of someone else's. The trouble it got him into was delicious. Somehow the author made us just hold onto liking him enough to keep reading. I was actually pleased that he made it up with his wife in the end in spite of the fact that he's a lecherous old professor.

The impossible stress of a 2-year old ("nubbies!") and a senile mum in the same house was wonderful - hilarious and heart-rending.

Brave of the author too to take on the mind of a beautiful, sexy, but somewhat sick Asian-American college student. At her best she was fabulous - I loved the poetry. Not so convinced by her second thoughts after Bob got exposed on the internet in his red leather miniskirt (great scenes!).

The plot was probably a bit lame when I think about it, but the structure of the book leads you on without having to think too much.

Alan, I'm going to look for more by you. Thanks for the thoughtful and sometimes moving entertainment.

Absolutely Brilliant
I don't know what to add to that. If you like Augusten Burroughs, David Sedaris, or A Confederacy of Dunces - you'll love this book. It's shockingly funny and good and I needed more at the end. Stunning!!!!!

A painful journey through one family's downfall
I HATED this. I'll give it 2 stars because the writing. .the style, the characters, were all very good. The STORY and the lack of narrative arc were soul crushingly bad. Main characters include Bob, a middle aged English professor, Julia, his substantially younger wife (former student)who is a slave to her demanding toddler, Julia's mother who is addled with Alzheimer's, Sienna, a current student with whom Bob is infatuated, and Donny, a former classmate of Julia's, now home repairman.

The chapters switch in focus from character to character, each written in a style that helps further explain their identity. Unfortunately, this intelligent writing doesn't make up for the fact that the story is AWFUL. It is PAINFUL to experience Julia's paralyzing frustration with her mother's declining mental state. Tragic things happen to most of these people. Donny, who has several chapters devoted to him, ends up serving almost no purpose at all.

The jacket description refers to this book as "tantalizingly erotic", with and "irresistible blend of darkness and humor." It WAS dark, but not darkly funny. And not sexy. I can't imagine what the other reviewers found so amusing in this book.

In the end, there is no resolution. In fact, it feels like the book just ENDS with no closing, as if the last few chapters had gone missing. I fully expected to give this book 3 stars, on the strength of the writing, up until the last page when I realized there would be no resolution.