3 out of 5 stars
This was a languid read, but that's OK. Really, you can't go wrong with Anne Tyler, right? My only complaint is I found myself wishing for more satisfaction and closure for Aaron, the main character. He got this great opportunity to talk to his wife again, and it never really went anywhere.
I say again, because his wife is dead, and he misses her. So imagine his surprise when she appears at random times throughout the day. And, it would seem (though we never really get to experience), other people can see her too. "The strangest thing about my wife’s return from the dead was how other people reacted," Aaron observes, and then notes that many people seem to rationalize or "forget" that Dorothy is dead rather than admit they might be seeing a ghost.
Aaron is a fussy, somewhat aloof and intelligent man toiling away at his family's vanity publishing company. Their claim to fame is a long string of "Beginner's Guides" that range from finances to dog training to travel. Aaron met Dorothy, a radiation oncologist, while researching "The Beginner’s Cancer." He describes himself as "geeky and gimpy," because he walks with the aid of a cane and a brace, and he also stammers sometimes. Before Dorothy’s death, on a hot summer day in 2007, they had been "happily, unremarkably married" for 11 years.
Dorothy is, by contrast, a squat, pragmatic woman with, as Aarons's sister observed, "the social skills of a panda bear." Aaron accepts and even seems to enjoy the fact that Dorothy is oblivious to fashion, and that "Only I noticed the creases as fine as silk threads that encircled her wrists and her neck. Only I knew her dear, pudgy feet, with the nails like tiny seashells."
What's great about Tyler, as always, is her comedic timing, her bluntness and her eye for the minutia that so often invade our thoughts at inappropriate times. Missing is any sense of true grief or loss that isn't a textbook cycle. But maybe that wasn't the point anyway.
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