#91: An Available Man

An Available Man, by Hilma Wolitzer

(New York: Ballantine Books, 2012)

Summary:
"In this tender and funny novel, award-winning author Hilma Wolitzer mines the unpredictable fallout of suddenly becoming single later in life, and the chaos and joys of falling in love the second time around. When Edward Schuyler, a modest and bookish sixty-two-year-old science teacher, is widowed, he finds himself ambushed by female attention. There are plenty of unattached women around, but a healthy, handsome, available man is a rare and desirable creature. Edward receives phone calls from widows seeking love, or at least lunch, while well-meaning friends try to set him up at dinner parties. Even an attractive neighbor offers herself to him.

"The problem is that Edward doesn't feel available. He's still mourning his beloved wife, Bee, and prefers solitude and the familiar routine of work, gardening, and bird-watching. But then his stepchildren surprise him by placing a personal ad in The New York Review of Books on his behalf. Soon the letters flood in, and Edward is torn between his loyalty to Bee's memory and his growing longing for connection. Gradually, reluctantly, he begins dating ('dating after death,' as one correspondent puts it), and his encounters are variously startling, comical, and sad. Just when Edward thinks he has the game figured our, a chance meeting proves that love always arrives when it's least expected.

"With wit, warmth, and a keen understanding of the heart, An Available Man explores aspects of loneliness and togetherness, and the difference in the options open to men and women of a certain age. Most of all, the novel celebrates the endurance of love, and its thrilling capacity to bloom anew."

Opening Line:
"Edward Schuyler was ironing his oldest blue oxford shirt in the living room on a Saturday afternoon when the first telephone call came."

My Take:
This and I Thought You Were Dead, together, should be required reading for anyone who's laying low and convalescing, whether from a stubborn case of bronchitis or from acute heartbreak. What a lovely, understated story of widowhood, grief, loneliness, and ultimately, love. Edward is just so real and likeable; he felt like a distant but kind relative, or the neighbor you always meant to have in for supper. And some of his first forays into dating are both poignant and funny: the businesslike woman with whom he has nothing in common, but who nonetheless expects sex at the end of the evening; the friendly widow who can't stop talking about her late husband and displaying photo after photo of their lives together; the cosmetically-altered, seemingly ageless 70 year old. The supporting cast are also well-sketched, particularly Edward's fragile stepdaughter Julie and tough-old-bird mother-in-law Gladys. I'm even OK with the reasonably happy ending.

#73: One True Thing

One True Thing, by Anna Quindlen

(New York:  Dell, 1995)

Summary:

"Ellen Gulden is in jail, accused of the mercy killing of her mother. She says she didn't do it; she thinks she knows who did.

"When Ellen learns of her mother Kate's cancer, the disease is already far advanced. Her father insists that Ellen quit her job and come home to take care of her, and as Ellen begins to spend her days with Kate, she learns many surprising things, about herself, her mother, and the life choices they both made. But as Kate's illness progresses, and her pain increases, so do the dosages of morphine. And so does Ellen's belief that her mother's suffering is unendurable....

"Widely admired for her intelligence, humor and insight, and for the depth of her perceptions about the public and private lives of ordinary people, Quindlen writes masterfully, and with great sophistication and grace about love and death, sexuality and betrayal, the triangles within a family, identity, growth, and change. Exploring the ambiguities that make up marriage, character, family, and fate, One True Thing takes each of us to the mysteries at the heart of the person we think we are, of who and what we know."

Opening Line:
"Jail is not as bad as you might imagine."

My Take:
This one is beautiful, heartbreaking, powerful. Not in a very wordy mood for once, but really loved it. 

#59: A Map of the World

A Map of the World, by Jane Hamilton

(New York: Doubleday, 1994)

 Summary:

"The book is concerned with how one seemingly inconsequential moment can alter lives forever. Alice Goodwin, mother of two, school nurse and wife of an aspiring dairy farmer in Wisconsin, is getting ready to take her two daughters and her best friend, Theresa's two little girls to their farm pond to swim. When she goes upstairs to find her bathing suit, Lizzy, Theresa's 2-year-old, slips away to the pond and drowns. It all goes downhill from there. The town tramp, whom Alice reprimanded for constantly bringing her sick son to school, accuses Alice of molesting her child. The entire town turns on the Goodwin family, fairly new to the area, and several other mothers come forward with tales of Alice's 'abuse'. Imprisonment, trial and loss of the farm ensue and Alice's husband and Theresa become 'involved.'

"The novel is essentially about a search for authenticity in the contemporary American midwest. A couple struggles to maintain their lives on a farm, keep to ethical practices of both farming and living, and to raise their two young children, but American society stymies their efforts. The novel is an indictment of the U.S. legal system, which works with the subtlety and mercy of a sledgehammer; the farming system, which values dollars over good food and the environment; and the American idea of marriage, which is falling apart from its own internal contradictions. However, the novel manages to be very funny throughout. Its humor comes out not just in the wicked, scathing sentences of its first third, told in a voice that one imagines is close to the author's own, but also in the structural choice of placing section two in the voice of the hilariously but tragically non-verbal husband. The contrast between husband's and wife's thinking is far more eloquent and entertaining than the recent popular psychological studies on the subject of male-female mental processes. Also included: the annoyingly efficient but oblivious mother-in-law, class and race differences but from a female perspective, and the politics of a small town."

Opening Line:

"I used to think if you fell from grace it was more likely than not the result of one stupendous error, or else an unfortunate accident."

My Take:

Yay! Once I finish this entry I'll be up to the book I'm currently reading.

Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful.

#58: The Inhabited World

The Inhabited World, by David Long

(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006)

 Summary:
"Evan Molloy -- a son, husband, and stepfather -- fatally shot himself but doesn"t know why. He is now stuck in a state of purgatory in the house in Washington State where he lived and died. Currently, a woman named Maureen Keniston lives there. She is in her late thirties and is trying to restart her life after breaking off a long affair with a married man. The novel moves back and forth between the story of Evan"s increasingly troubled life and Maureen"s efforts to emerge from her own purgatory. In watching Maureen's struggles and ultimate triumph, Evan comes to see his own life and death in a completely new way."

Opening Line:
"When he looks at his hand, he sees the hand he remembers -- ropy branching veins, a ridge of waxy skin on the inside of the wrist were he fumbled a glowing iron rod at his father's forge one afternoon in 1966."

My Take:
I've said it before, but meh. Very slow. Either I didn't get something at the end (perhaps I'd already gotten bored and wasn't paying sufficient attention) but it seemed as though nothing happened. Not one of my favorites.

#14: The Lost Saints of Tennessee

The Lost Saints of Tennessee, by Amy Franklin-Willis (New York: Atlantic Monthly, 2012)

Summary:
"With enormous heart and dazzling agility, debut novelist Amy Franklin-Willis expertly mines the fault lines in one Southern working-class family. Driven by the soulful and intrepid voices of forty-two-year-old Ezekiel Cooper and his mother, Lillian, The Lost Souls of Tennessee journeys from the 1940s to the 1980s as it follows Zeke's evolution from anointed son to honorable sibling to unhinged middle-aged man.

"After Zeke loses his twin brother in a mysterious drowning and his wife to divorce, only ghosts remain in his hometown of Clayton, Tennessee. Zeke makes the decision to leave Clayton in a final attempt to escape his pain, puts his two treasured possessions -- a childhood copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tucker, his dead brother's ancient dog -- into his truck, and heads east. He leaves behind two adolescent daughters and his estranged mother, who reveals her own conflicting view of the Cooper family story in a vulnerable but spirited voice stricken by guilt over old sins as she clings to the hope that her family isn't beyond repair.

"When Zeke finds refuge with his sympathetic cousins in Virginia horse country, divine acts in the form of severe weather, illness, and a new romance collide, leading Zeke to a crossroads where he must decide the fate of his family -- either by clinging to the way life was or moving toward what life might be."

Opening Line:
"The late August air lies still, its weight pressing down on me in a way it didn't when I was a boy."

My Take:
Not high literature for the ages, possibly not even book club material (I wish I knew, but never have stumbled on a book club that was looking for new members) -- but a lovely, gentle story about a man confronting that all-too-familiar midlife question, "Is this really all there is?" Long story short (really, for once), I enjoyed it.

#109: Damned

Damned, by Chuck Palahniuk (New York: Doubleday, 2011)

Opening Lines and Summary:
"Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. I'm just now arrived here, in Hell, but it's not my fault except for maybe dying from an overdose of marijuana."

"'Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison,' declares the whip-tongued thirteen-year-old narrator of Damned, Chuck Palahniuk's subversive new work of fiction. The daughter of a narcissistic film star and a billionaire, Madison is abandoned at her Swiss boarding school over Christmas while her parents are off touting their new projects and adopting more orphans. She dies over the holiday of a marijuana overdose -- and the next thing she knows, she's in Hell. Madison shares her cell with a motley crew of young sinners that is almost too good to be true: a cheerleader, a jock, a nerd, and a punk rocker, united by fate to form the six-feet-under version of everyone's favorite detention movie. Madison and her pals must trek across the Dandruff Desert and cross the Valley of Used Disposable Diapers to confront Satan in his citadel, and all the popcorn balls and wax lips that serve as the currency of Hell won't buy them off.

"This is the afterlife as only Chuck Palahniuk could imagine it: a twisted inferno where The English Patient plays on endless repeat, roaming demons devour sinners limb by limb, and the damned interrupt your dinner from their sweltering call center to hard-sell you Hell ... He makes eternal torment, well, simply divine."

My Take:
What a pleasant surprise. I picked this one up despite knowing Palahniuk's books leave me feeling in desperate need of a shower, because the premise just seemed too damned funny (excuse the pun) to pass up. It was, and grody as the descriptions of the underworld were, Damned made me laugh more than it left me with that visceral ickiness I had after Pygmy and Choke. It's hilarious.

#76: Kindred Spirits

Kindred Spirits, by Sarah Strohmeyer (New York: Penguin Group, 2011)

Summary:
"When life gives you lemons, call your best girlfriends and whip up some lemon martinis. Such is the mantra for the Ladies Society for the Conservation of Martinis, which was established after one fateful PTA meeting when four young mothers -- Lynne, Mary Kay, Beth, and Carol -- discovered they had more in common than they ever thought possible.

"Meeting once a month, the women would share laughs and secrets and toast to their blossoming friendship with a clink of their sacred martini glasses. The Society was their salvation, their refuge, a place where they could vent about kids, work, and husbands and celebrate their mutual appreciation for a good cocktail. But when life-shattering circumstances force the group to dissolve, their friendship is never quite the same ... until two years later, when a tragic event puts the Society back in session.

"When Lynne passes away suddenly, she leaves behind one simple request: that her old friends sort through her belongings. Reluctantly, the women reunite to rummage through her closets. There's nothing remarkable -- no kinky sex toys, no embarrassing diary. But buried deep within Lynne's lingerie drawer is an envelope addressed to the Society. In it, they find a letter than reveals a stunning personal secret and a final wish that will send the woman on a life-changing journey where they will discover unexpected truths about themselves, each other, and the meaning of friendship."

Opening Line:
"A martini is the world's most sophisticated cocktail, a classic of beauty and simplicity that derives its intoxicating allure from the melding of four strikingly different sensations."

My Take:
As I suspected, Kindred Spirits was no Dreams of Joy. While it wasn't quite as formulaic as Legacy, it was certainly closer to that end of the continuum. Even as a heartwarming story about female friendship, others have done far better at capturing the complex bonds among group members and making us care what happens to the characters.

Maybe it's because there's no real tension here. All we know is that the four principals met and bonded at a PTA meeting several years ago, after which they started getting together once a month for girl talk and martinis. Eventually, Lynne battles cancer, and Carol has a mad-as-hell-and-not-going-to-take-it-anymore moment that leads her, inexplicably, to leave her husband and kids and start a new life as a career gal in NYC ... which causes the Society to drift apart until Lynne's death two years later. During the course of the novel, the three survivors sort through Lynne's belongings and find a top-secret letter asking them to find the baby girl she'd given up for adoption 30 years earlier. Along the way, Carol begins to wonder whether she'd been a bit too hasty in leaving her marriage, Mary Kay agonizes after how to tell fiance Drake that she can't have children, and Beth worries that the life she and her husband had always dreamed of is passing them by. Any or all this could make for a halfway decent story, except the characters and their feelings aren't really presented with enough depth or description to hook us in. They never seem to argue, and we see little of their friendship -- dialogue, memories, etc. -- to understand why they became close in the first place, what made the others stop seeing each other after Carol left, etc.

All in all, not a horrible way to spend an afternoon, but not especially memorable, either.

#54: Red Hook Road

Red Hook Road, by Ayelet Waldman (New York: Doubleday, 2010).

Summary:
"Becca Copaken and John Tetherly are young and in love, and the future looks as bright as the day of their marriage. Becca's family is well-to-do and summers in Red Hook, Maine, where John's mother, Jane, runs a housecleaning service for clients like the Copakens. The only thing that binds the two families is the love the elated couple share, but it's enough to bring them together for the occasion.

"Until the unthinkable happens: Becca and John's limousine collides with another vehicle mere minutes after the wedding, killing them instantly. Joy gives way to grief, and the rifts between Becca's mother, Iris, and Jane grow, from the funeral arrangements to Iris's strong-willed interest in the musical career of Jane's niece to a new romance that buds between the surviving children, Ruthie and Matt. Time's healing powers prove elusive for Iris and Jane. Iris's thirty-year marriage disintegrates, while Jane's bitterness threatens to ruin her relationship with Matt. Only when a powerful, blinding storm hits Red Hook do the families begin to see what really matters most."

Opening Line:
"The flower girl had lost her basket of rose petals and could not bear to have the photograph taken without it."

My Take:
I had a few rough days this week -- let's say I was definitely in the valleys of the unemployment roller coaster -- and went to the library looking to be entertained and distracted. Don't worry if that doesn't automatically scream "couple killed on their wedding day" to you; Mr. Hazelthyme didn't get it, either. It's about catharsis, people ... that, and reading something that doesn't take too long or make you work too hard to become engaged.

So far (I'm on page 130), this fits the bill: hard to put down, but beautifully written with an excellent eye for detail and nuance. Given the subject matter, that does indeed mean it's painfully sad in parts. One example: the following early passage, where John's brother Matt reflects on whether it's more painful when others mention his late brother, or when they don't speak about him:

"At the sound of their names, Ruthie twitched. For the first couple of weeks Matt had felt the same way. Every mention of the names of the dead seemed to light a small hot fire inside him. Then one day a few weeks back he woke up and found that, suddenly, the opposite was true: it was the minutes, the hours, the entire days that went by without someone mentioning John that hurt Matt the most. He had tried to talk about John to his mother, but that went nowhere. So he had started hanging out with John's friends. Every evening he would head over to the Neptune, and stake out a stool in the middle of the bar. As people trickled in they would stop and pass a few minutes with him. Some offered no more than their condolences, some tried to buy him a beer. And that was okay. But what Matt was waiting for were the stories. About the birch bark canoe with swept-up gunwale and a squared bow that John and a friend had built for a middle school project on the Passamaquoddy tribe. About how one hunting season, when another buddy was laid up with a broken leg, John had filled his freezer with venison steaks, because he knew the guy relied on his yearly buck to feed his family. They'd retell John's jokes -- Matt must have heard the one about the robber in the sperm bank a dozen times. They'd remind one another about practical jokes John had played on them. The guys, as sad as they were, as much as they missed their friend, always ended up laughing, especially once they'd had a few. And if Matt rarely laughed out loud with them, as long as he was sitting on that barstool he felt okay. He felt like he was close to his brother. He was dreading the end of the summer, dreading the prospect of going back to college and being surrounded by people who had never known John, who had never laughed at his jokes or been the beneficiaries of his unsolicited largesse, who didn't know or care that he was dead."

(afterwards) Excellent book. It follows the surviving Copaken and Tetherly family members through the five summers that follow John and Becca's deaths, trying to move on with their lives knowing all the while there really is no such thing -- no going back to the way it was Before. As the summary suggests, Ruthie and Matt find comfort in each other, and struggle with the usual twenty-something "who am I and what am I doing with my life?" questions beneath the weight of their losses. Ruthie, who can't bear to return to London and the Fulbright her mother's always dreamed of/ expected for her, finds unexpected satisfaction working in the tiny Red Hook library ... while Matt finds a disappointing lack of the same as he endeavors to finish the work John started restoring an old wooden schooner. Jane is so committed to her stiff-upper-lipped New England stoicism that she can't even bear to talk about John, which strains her relationship with her surviving son. Iris channels her pain into overseeing the education of Samantha, Jane's niece and ward, who had been Becca and John's nine-year-old flower girl, and turns out to be a musical prodigy who's talent's gone unrecognized by her family to date. Daniel, Iris's husband and Becca and Ruthie's father, finds an outlet in the training and boxing he'd enjoyed as a young man, even if this opens a near-fatal rift in his marriage to Iris. Under the tutelage of Iris's father, renowned violinist Mr. Kimmelbrod, Samantha blossoms as a violinist, and teaching her gives him something positive to cling to even as his body grows increasingly frail. The ending is a little too dramatic for my tastes (thought it would probably translate quite well to film, and seeing this happen wouldn't surprise me much), but overall, this one's a keeper and a recommend-to-others book.

#112 - Home Safe

I love Elizabeth Berg. She's pretty prolific, and I haven't read all her books -- but I've read a few (I'm looking at the "Also By" listing now, and The Art of Mending, Open House, and Range of Motion are all familiar), and they're just what I want in a fun read: short chapters, not too taxing, but plausible and non-formulaic enough that I don't feel like I'm reading utter trash (yeah, I have weird Issues with this, I know).

So when I saw Home Safe (Random House, 2009) on the library's new acquisitions shelf, well, it just jumped right onto the stack in my arms. Uh huh. And I wasn't disappointed. It's certainly not haunting the way Columbine or even a particularly intense novel would be, but then again, that's not always what I'm looking for. If a cigar is sometimes just a cigar, well, sometimes a good story is just a good story.

And Home Safe is a good story. The protagonist is the recently-widowed Helen Ames, a middle-aged Midwestern author who's been unmoored since her late husband Dan succumbed to a heart attack at the breakfast table. As she muses in the first chapter,

"She believes the last thing Dan felt was surprise, and to her way of thinking, it wasn't a bad way to go. The bad part is he left her here without him, ignorant of ... everything.

"People used to accuse her of being overly dependent on Dan, and it was true. 'You give away your power,' one friend told Helen. 'You infantilize yourself.' On that occasion, Helen looked down at her salad plate as though acknowledging culpability and feeling bad about it, but what she was thinking was, Oh, shut up. It feels good to infantilize myself. You ought to try it. Might take an edge off. ...

"In addition to her greatest love, Helen has lost the person who handled the practical side of their life together. All this time later, Helen is still shaky on managing the simplest aspects of her finances, despite the fact that she has an accountant to ask questions of. She trusted Dan to take care of his own income and hers; she didn't want to know anything about what he was doing."

For the moment, aside from annoying her daughter Tessa with requests for mechanical repairs, this isn't a problem. "Financially, she is fine: she and Dan created for themselves a nice nest egg. It is in other ways that she is not." Most poignant of these "other ways" is a paralyzing writer's block:

"[S]he can no longer write. Bad enough that writing was the way she made her living; it was also her anchor, her lens, her abiding consolation. Next to Dan, it was her greatest love. Without her husband or the practice of laying out words on a page, she feels that she spends her days rattling around inside herself; that whereas she used to be a whole and happy woman, now she is many pieces of battered self, slung together in a sack of skin. ...

"These days Helen looks around the places she goes to, and nothing seems worth noting, or even quite there. These days, she comes into her study, sits at the desk, starts up the computer, and drinks coffee while she tries to avoid looking at the blinking cursor, that electronic tapping foot. Sometimes she moves to her little white sofa to read from volumes of poetry she used to find inspiring, and sometimes she reads from her own previously published novels. Irrespective of what she reads, though, when she goes back to sit before the computer, there is the same stubborn emptiness, the same locked door. So she shuts the computer down and leaves the room, pulling the door firmly closed behind her."

Good thing, then, that the money's not a problem. Or so Helen thinks, until (after weeks of unreturned phone calls) her accountant finally sits her down and gives her the news: instead of nearly a million dollars, she has only $50,000 of her nest egg left.

No, this is neither a reaction to the recent financial meltdown or another story in which the absent husband turns out to have had another family and another life all along. It turns out that unbeknownst to her, Dan was building Helen's dream house in San Francisco, intending for them both to retire there. Convinced by architect Tom Ellis (himself a 9/11 almost-widower), she flies to the west coast to visit, and the house is indeed breathtaking ... but how on earth can Helen imagine living there without Dan? For that matter, how can she leave Illinois? And what about Tessa?

The unexpected depletion of her savings, however, forces Helen to let the house question take a back seat to more pressing matters: earning a living. After a whimsical attempt to get a job at Anthropologie ends in disaster, she accepts a gig she dreads: teaching a creative writing class. To make matters worse, the class is so popular that a second section is added, and Helen's nemesis, Saundra Weller, is invited to teach that one. "But Saundra Weller! Helen can't stand her, with her endless self-promotion and her snotty attitude toward ... well, toward Helen, for one thing. They were on a panel together at a book festival, and Saundra made no secret of the fact that she found Helen to be a vastly inferior writer."

As you might expect (OK, the book's not really formulaic), the writing class turns out to be a fascinating exercise, both for Helen and her students. Never mind that Saundra's star pupil, Margot Langley, recently wrote Helen an anti-fan letter, proclaiming her writing mawkish, clumsy, and insipid -- Helen's, er, unusual cast of students surprise her with their insights and their enthusiasm. Foremost among these is the inscrutable Claudia, a painfully introverted young woman whose shyness conceals the talent of a real artist.

Another theme which runs throughout the story is the tension between Helen and the 27-year-old Tessa. Helen seems to know she's leaning too heavily on her daughter, yet can't seem to help herself, whether it's dropping off leftovers or buying expressly unwanted clothes or attempting clumsy fix-ups with an eligible young man from her writing class. Tessa is kind but firm with her mother, and begins to think she herself might just want to move to the house in San Francisco.

None of the characters or story lines are exceptionally memorable, but Home Safe is nonetheless an absorbing and believable story of grief, loss, family, and the writing process. (I can't help wondering how much of Helen's character is autobiographical, but then again, how Helen describes her inspiration makes me wonder: Does it matter? Isn't all writing based on our own experience to some degree?) The weaving together of the plot lines is realistic and well-done, and concludes with just the right balance of resolution and uncertainty. (I don't like sloppy, unduly tangled plots, but I'm not a fan of overly tidy endings, either.) Not one I'd necessarily buy for myself, but well worth the read if it's a loaner or secondhand.

Not with a bang, but with a whisper

Well, I did it. I started this blog back in January to keep track of the books I read during the year, wondering if I'd make 100. Not quite a week into October, I got there. Yesterday, I finished my 100th book of the year: Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, A Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson, by Mitch Albom (Doubleday, 1997).

That explains the title of this post: In a word, eh. Just in case you've been on Mars for the last 12 years, this is the author's account of his weekly visits to an old college professor, Morrie Schwartz, during the last few months of Schwartz's life, while he was dying from ALS. It's a short book, with most chapters only a few pages; I read through it in the course of one Sunday afternoon. Yes, it's uplifting and heartwarming, and all the things you wouldn't expect of a book about dying. Yes, some of the aphorisms Morrie offers during what he deems his last class, or Mitch's last thesis, make for nice sound bites: "Love is the only rational act." "Learn how to die, and you learn how to live." You get the idea.

Perhaps if this was the first of Albom's books I'd read, I'd have found it more moving. This wasn't the case, however. After having read The Five People You Meet In Heaven and For One More Day, though ... this one seemed rather predictable. Tugs the heartstrings, makes you think about what really matters in life, not too taxing intellectually, sells like hotcakes. While Albom is a skilled writer, and his devotion to Schwartz was certainly admirable, I'm starting to think that having read three of his books, I've seen what he has to say. I'd probably read his latest, Have a Little Faith, if I stumbled across it, but won't go out of my way for it.

#96 - The Pilot's Wife

Whew. I think I can, I think I can, I think I can, I think I can. This was a big backlog even for me. Consequently, I probably won't do The Pilot's Wife, by Anita Shreve (Back Bay Books, 1998), justice. Even so, it seems I've got another trusty source of quick, entertaining reads in my pocket. I started this one while marooned at the garage this morning, and finished it late this afternoon after knocking off a kick-@$$ cover letter and resume. Yeah, it's an Oprah book, candy for the brain, but I still liked it.

The tale begins with Kathryn Lyons awakened in the middle of the night by a knock at the door that will change her life irrevocably: her husband Jack's plane has gone down off the coast of Ireland. Along with the usual burdens of losing a loved one -- telling their 15 year old daughter, Mattie; making funeral arrangements -- come a hefty dose of the extraordinary. Given the public nature of the crash, the Lyons' home is quickly surrounded by a media maelstrom. Speculation about what caused the crash and whether Jack was responsible only fuel the reporters' curiosity, and compound Kathryn and Mattie's isolation. As evidence surfaces piece by piece, Kathryn can't help but question how well she knew her husband, and what she can be certain of.

Interspersed with the post-crash scenes are Kathryn's recollections of her life with Jack, beginning with their meeting at her grandmother's antique shop some 16 years earlier, and leading up to his departure for London that last morning. Certainly, this isn't a new technique, but Shreve manages it with far more nuance than some. These flashbacks aren't heavy-handed clues to Jack's death or the facets Kathryn didn't see; they're merely the fabric of a marriage, seen in retrospect.

Similarly, one plot development I'd feared almost from the beginning doesn't actually happen, which is a good thing. I'm not fond of spoilers, so I'll just say that an obvious cliche was nicely sidestepped.

Great literature this isn't, but a good vacation or rainy-day read? You betcha.