What happens when you reconnect with your first love forty years later? When the music you made together in your teens goes viral when you’re in your fifties? Exploring these questions, Howard Lovy’s Found and Lost: The Jake and Cait Story may be just what the doctor ordered for readers living through our difficult times.
Lovy, an accomplished nonfiction writer and journalist, has given us memorable protagonists in his debut novel: Jacob Rosner and Caitlin Doyle. We meet them — and they meet each other — at Interlochen Arts Camp, where they are both spending the summer. Jake, a secular Jewish teen, has just started playing the guitar, while Cait, a Catholic who is struggling with her faith, has long been a student of classical music and plays the violin and cello. While individually neither is an exceptional musician, together they create music that is nothing short of magical.
Lovy takes us through Jake and Cait’s ups and downs, their separation, and their reunion — but not in chronological order. Rather, Found and Lost is divided into three alternating sections, each with a different focus. The chapters that take place in the 1980s are lovely forays into teen summer romance, with all the intensity of those first connections and the belief that love will last forever and conquer all. The present-day chapters bring the two protagonists together again around their music after a forty-year gap. Innocence gone, and families and commitments now taking up the space between them, Jake and Cait have decisions to make and past hurts with which they need to come to terms. Finally, there are the chapters relaying scenes from a documentary made about the musical pair. These chapters celebrate celebrity and our collective need for a positive story. They have a showbizzy feel and are full of delightful musical and cultural references that take readers of a certain age down memory lane.
While Found and Lost is great fun, the novel also asks some important questions: How do we change as we grow older? Can commonalities transcend our differences? Can we truly forgive another — or ourselves? Readers may find themselves thinking about soulmates or bashert. Ultimately, Found and Lost is a story about many different expressions of love — the love we experience in our youth and in later life, the love of music and of a time — the 1980s — when the pace was slower; and the world seemed kinder. Lovy’s novel is a much-needed novel of hope and optimism that leaves readers a little wiser, with a full heart and a smile.
Diane Gottlieb is the editor of Awakenings: Stories of Body & Consciousness, the forthcoming Manna Songs: Stories of Jewish Culture & Heritage and the Prose/Creative Nonfiction Editor of Emerge Literary Journal. Her writing appears in Brevity, River Teeth, Witness, Florida Review, The Rumpus, Huffington Post, among many other lovely places.
