The Private Life of Axie Reed

by John Knowles

While recovering from a nearly fatal accident, Axie looks back over her life as an actress, wife, and friend, as she decides whether she wants to live or die. (Nancy Pearl)

256 pages, Hardcover

First published April 23, 1986

About the author

John Knowles was an American novelist best known for A Separate Peace (1959).

Reviews

[Richard Jespers · Rating 2 out of 5]

I taught Knowles’s novel, A Separate Peace, to tenth graders for several years. This bildungsroman is a novel rich with fully developed characters, a book that has, rightfully so, been read by millions for decades. Perhaps it is not fair to do (it’s like comparing one’s children), but when one stands Axie up against Peace, it simply does not fare as well. One, one doesn’t believe that Knowles really knows the main character, Axie, or for that matter, the narrator of certain chapters, Nick, Axie’s cousin. Although as a celebrity himself, Knowles may be acquainted with a famous actor, one doesn’t really quite believe his portrayal. Oh, his descriptions are fine, but she’s fleshed out only to a certain point. Likewise, one learns absolutely little about Nick (and why does Knowles select a name so closely associated with the narrator of The Great Gatsby?), and much of it comes later in the novel. Second, one doesn’t believe the situation, and, in part that may be due to the novel’s structure. After readers learn who Axie is, an actor retiring at age fifty because she can no longer get desirable parts (one assumes this is set in the 1980s), she suffers a quirky accident at a fête of some kind and is seriously injured. The rest of the novel weaves back and forth between Axie’s and Nick’s past and the present. Chapters about her being in the hospital are portrayed in first person through her subterranean world of unconsciousness, which strains credulity a bit, because how does a person in a near-coma state know what she is thinking? Too much of the novel consists of backstory, yet such backstory is necessary because Knowles has set it up that way. Axie’s acting jobs, her loves, her only marriage, lack a certain verisimilitude because, in part, the portrayal is shorthanded or speeded up, so one can get back to the present, where a former actor is in the hospital with broken ribs from her quirky fall. In the beginning, one is given some hints about the cause of Axie’s fall: a series of dizzy spells. One expects to learn more about such spells, particularly, near the end. However, one never does whether such spells are even relevant, whether they are the cause of her quirky fall at the ball. The main physician seems a bit dizzy himself, speaking in (if you’ve listened to doctorspeak enough) a manner, at times, that seems more lay-person than physician. In all, Knowles has done his job; he just hasn’t done it well enough. Would this novel have been published in 1986 if it had been shoved over the transom by someone other than John Knowles?

[Terimorse · Rating 3 out of 5]

You would think you were reading a book by some other author if you have read John Knowles other books. This one is nothing like Peace Breaks Out, and the couple after that.