The Fix by Marianne Levy
This had such a promising premise, and I really wanted to love where it was going. Unfortunately, while I think the concept has a lot of merit, the execution never quite delivered on everything the book seemed to be setting up.
The Fix takes place in a world exactly like ours—with one enormous exception. There is now an injection that can reverse aging. Think Benjamin Button, but medically induced.
Our main character, Julia, is a 45-year-old journalist who agrees to take the treatment for free in exchange for documenting the experience. She has a longtime husband and two daughters: 22-year-old Zoe and 12-year-old Lottie. As Julia begins physically growing younger, she experiences firsthand just how differently the world treats her based solely on her perceived age.
And that idea is fascinating.
As the treatment becomes more widespread, age itself starts becoming almost impossible to determine. Your cardiologist might look like a teenager. Parents and children can appear to be peers. All of the visual cues we use to make assumptions about someone’s experience, authority, attractiveness, vulnerability, and place in society suddenly become unreliable.
There is so much to explore there.
That was ultimately my frustration with The Fix: I kept waiting for the novel to really dig into the enormous questions its premise raises, and I never felt like it quite got there. Levy creates this massive societal disruption, but the story felt smaller and more scattered than I expected. The themes were clearly there, but the message never fully landed for me.
I also wanted more from Julia. At times she felt unfocused as a main character, particularly considering how extraordinary her circumstances were. I wanted a deeper exploration of what becoming younger would mean for her identity as a woman, wife, mother, professional, and person who has already lived 45 years.
What did work for me was how surprisingly realistic much of it felt. If this treatment actually existed, I absolutely believe people would rush to take it—and that our obsession with youth would create consequences we hadn’t remotely considered.
Ultimately, The Fix gave me a terrific premise and a lot to think about, but I was left wishing the novel had pushed its own ideas much further.
Thank you to St. Martin’s Press for providing me with an advance reading copy.
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