This heartbreaking, joyous autobiographical novel oscillates between love and loss. It begins on the night the narrator meets his wife of 30 years; in the next chapter we see her in her final illness. As successive chapters go back and forth in time, we come to know them and their marriage intimately. And not just them. His alter ego’s Jewish mother and Latin father, and his Jewish in-laws from Long Island, are memorable personalities too.
Yglesias limns detailed portraits of even minor characters, like a doorman, hospice physician or couples therapist. Yglesias, like the late John Updike, has the uncanny ability to describe the moment-tomoment feelings of his characters in precise and graceful language, often with astute similes. The in-laws “reacted to feelings as if they were brand-new purchases that didn’t fit the room for which they were bought.” After charming his future wife’s college friends, the protagonist “felt as if he had been welcomed into a friendly foreign land.”
A reader becomes the confidante of a talented, passionate, touchingly insecure man who is delighted by and profoundly devoted to a singular woman. The story of their life together leaves an indelible impression of them and their love.
