Book review: The Beginner’s Goodbye

‘THE strangest thing about my wife’s return from the dead was how other people reacted.” If, like me, you adore Anne Tyler’s novels, this opening sentence rings a few alarm bells.

Watch out, it seems to say: here comes a tiresome exercise in American whimsy, a doubly pathetic paso doble with the Grim Reaper.

Already, an Anne Tyler novel is a grit-free zone, where endings routinely skid off towards happiness and characterisation invariably nudges towards the warm-hearted. And if thirtysomething publisher Aaron Woolcott’s doctor wife Dorothy really has come back from the dead – and he seems convinced that she has, and that other people can see her too – we are surely dangerously near a saccharine overdose.

Woolcott, 6ft 4in but crippled since childhood, meets his wife, a humourless 5ft Latino doctor, when he asks her to contribute to his firm’s “Beginner’s Guide” series: in this case, a beginner’s guide to cancer. Their relationship is fraught, but when she dies – a tree in their leafy Baltimore suburb topples on their house, causing the Sony Trinitron television to impale her to the floor – he is consumed by grief.

Nothing I have written so far would, I must admit, make me want to read this novel, which sounds too obviously primed – the job, the marriage, the death – for unconvincing comedy.

Yet Tyler writes with a generosity of spirit and an emotional truthfulness that make you forget the bare mechanics of plot. She has always had the seemingly effortless ability to depict character in at least three dimensions, and she uses that craft here to look clearly at grief. When he is thinking about the things he wants to tell Dorothy, Woolcott notes: “That was one of the worst things about losing your wife, I found: that your wife is the very person you want to discuss it all with.” A simple thought: but I doubt you’ll readily find a book that fleshes it out as credibly, movingly and even as optimistically as this.