03.30.2005 Maybe I'll Call Anna By William Browning Spencer Literary Fiction (c) 1990 275 pages

I was prepared to hate this book. The plot -- about an emergency room orderly named David who falls in love with a suicidal patient named Anna -- sounded like it could easily be the male equivalent of a bad romance novel. The author's picture on the back of the book I immediately disliked -- he has the face of a guy who doesn't have much luck in anything but is at the same time extremely desperate to prove himself. And in truth, the first 95 pages of the book fulfilled the plot's promise, being a schlocky ode to the '60's. If I didn't feel obligated to finish the book (because I had barely started a couple of recent books), I would've written it off as a 1 and called it a day.

But the second part of the book turned things around. It followed the much more interesting character of Richard Parrish, a gold-digging, ladder-climbing, adoration junkie psychiatrist who worked in the hospital where Anna was later committed. He also falls in love with Anna and subsequently gets her pregnant, and when she proves a threat to his future at the hospital he comes to the conclusion that she has to die.

I'm not saying the book became miraculously brilliant at the second part, and indeed there were some problems with the book. For a while, Spencer designated the speaker and year at the beginning of the chapter so that you knew from whose perspective the story was told, but for some reason, he abandoned that halfway through the book. It made for some confusing moments. And my edition had a lot of spelling and punctuation mistakes. Missing letters, words appearing twice, extra quotation marks, and the general mispelled words. Overall, I probably wouldn't recommend this book to anyone -- I moderately enjoyed it and thought the ending was decent, but in general, it was a predictable and bland book.

2.5/5 STARS

FAVORITE AMAZON REVIEW from Publisher's Weekly
Spencer's discerning first novel draws the reader into a whirlpool of mad romantic obsession that spans 20 years. Aspiring artist David Livingston, moonlighting as a hospital orderly, is immediately captivated by self-destructive Anna Shockley, whom he encounters in the emergency room where she has been taken after a typical 1960s drug overdose. He takes up residence in Anna's boarding house as a frustrated observer of her violent relationship with a drug-dealing boyfriend, and eventually becomes her lover. But Anna's grasp of reality is consistently shaky, and she sees psychiatrist Richard Parrish while David does a very brief stint in the Army. Her fatal femininity affects Parrish much as it did David, creating a triangular relationship whose drama comes to a head in 1986. The author's vigorous use of language and strong characterizations contribute to an intriguing story.

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