The Book That Matters Most was definitely not as interesting or satisfying for me as Hood's The Obituary Writer. Perhaps it was because I couldn't develop enough sympathy for Ava, the character at the center of this novel – somehow she didn't ring true for me.
Ava is heartbroken and distraught when her husband of twenty-five years leaves her for another woman, which is certainly understandable. Her grown children, a son and a wayward troubled daughter, Maggie, are living far away from Ava's comfortable home in Providence. Ava's mother is long dead and that loss is a wound that has never healed because Ava has not accepted it. In many ways, Ava has not gone forward and this is her true problem.
The novel weaves around Ava's difficulty in coping with her losses. She has an affair with a younger man she meets in the book club she joins to combat her loneliness. (The structure of the book club is for each member to choose "the book that matters most" to them, hence this novel's title.) Her daughter, who is living in Paris, has fallen into a drug-centered existence and is completely dependent on the older man who has turned her head, made her a kind of love-slave and feeds her addiction.
The reality is that Ava does lead something of a charmed life. She lives in a beautiful home in an elegant section of Providence, Rhode Island. She teaches French. Unlike other women in mid-life who are faced with her losses, she is not struggling financially or materially. She has loyal friendships.
Her problems have a very first-world setting and I want her to get on with things and fix her life. It takes an entire novel and a lot of improbable twists before she gets around to that, and then the conclusion, which finally ties everything up, seems forced. A little ambiguity might have been better and given the reader more food for thought.
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