(courtesy Harper Collins Publishers)
The power of books to shape and mend peoples’ lives for the better is well and often remarked upon.
Reading is seen, and quite rightly too, as a way of engendering wonder, curiosity and empathy, of opening the minds of those who lose themselves in books to worlds and possibilities far beyond their own, and of extending life’s boundaries far more beyond the immediately tangible.
Just how impactful this can be is seen in How to Read a Book by Monica Wood, a novel which explores how lives can be changed for the better by books, bookstores and the kindhearted, if flawed, souls who congregate to them.
It centres on three key people, though it is the first two who really power the story initially and give it the impetus that carries effortlessly through a story that never over-eggs itself and which never delves into crass sentimentality, preferring to stay rooted in the messy uncertainty of everyday humanity.
Violet Powell is a twenty-two-year-old woman from rural Maine who ends up in prison after some very poor choices with her loser boyfriend sees her at the wheel when she drunkenly collide with a car driven by a local schoolteacher who dies as the result of the accident.
It’s while incarcerated that Violet meets retired English teacher Harriet Lawson, a woman who is staring down the barrel of an empty nest and who wants to give back to society that really makes a difference.
And then my only sister—the firstborn named for a queen—pulls away in her big, bright car. I stand on the brick sidewalk of Grant Street in Portland, Maine, where I know not one person out of sixty-five thousand people, and watch my sister drive away to her husband, and her new tiles, and her future children who will never know their aunt Violet, a woman who would have loved them despite everything they will hear.
Harriet and Violet connect – to be fair, Harriet, breaking a whole host of rules governing how she should relate to the prisoners, makes a real impact on all the members of the prison book club to which Violet belongs – but no one expects that they will come to reconnect once Violet is released.
But reconnect they do in the city of Portland, Maine, a city where Violet, set up in an apartment and with money from an inheritance doled out by a sister and wider family that shun her for the accident and it’s resultant tragic outcomes, knows no one and where she wonders how on earth she will ever remake her now sundered life.
Meeting Harriet, and at a bookstore too, transforms not only Violet and her former prison teacher’s life but that of the store’s handyman Frank, who, it turns out, is the widower of the woman who died at Violet’s hands.
If your first instinct is to think that the plot all seems a tad too contrived and more than a little sudsy and that everyone will waltz off into the sunset, scrubbed clean of pain and complication to a flawless degree, then think again because Wood does a superbly moving job of ensuring that How to Read a Book has its feet every firmly planted in the stuff of real life.
In fact, while there are some beautifully happy endings to a story of found family, healing and futures rediscovered, where How to Read a Book really comes alive is the slow and considerate way in which it brings three disparate people together in wonderfully transformative ways.
(courtesy official author site)
The delight of How to Read a Book is that it doesn’t pretend that just because you meet your people that everything will then automatically and neatly fall into place.
It is honest to a powerful degree about how even promising news starts and hopeful and unexpectedly wonderful new relationship can stumble and fall, and how hard it can be to let the past go even when a new and potentially glittering new future beckons.
There is an empathetic understanding at work in How to Read a Book which speaks to an author who understands the contrary ways of the human condition and how the obviously beneficial and the wondrously good do not always translate immediately, if at all, into rich and changed new lives.
Many a movie-of-the-week and heart-on-the-sleeve novel would like you to believe the mere whiff of promise and hope is enough to comprehensively transform broken and damaged lives, but life often moves at a slower and more uneven pace than escapist storytelling, wonderful though it is (and yes, we need storytelling that defies the odds and imagines a superlative best place outcome), and How to Read a Book embraces that with quiet and nuanced gusto.
In so doing, it offers real hope that while everything around you might seem broken and lost, that it can be redeemed, remade and reborn; it just might take longer and follow a longer and more winding road than you are expecting.
‘I’d go with Claudia Rankine,’ Baker said, ringing it up. ‘But Maya’s okay. You buying that one, too?’
‘Yes,’ Harriet said, handing over the book of quotes. As she set it on the counter, it opened to what could not possibly—could it?— be a random page. Forgive everyone.
But that’s the beauty of life.
It delivers often, but not in the way or with the timing we want or need but How to Read a Book reassures in ways that are heartfelt and rawly honest, that that doesn’t mean it won’t get there eventually.
As Violet, Harriet and Frank figure out what it means to be in each others’ lives and what that might mean given the strange ways in which they are connected – ways that some people of smaller mind and less expansive heart see as hopelessly unfixable – How to Read a Book comes alive with the truth of what it means to be human when mistakes are often made and consequences linger far longer than we might want.
It is a rich and quietly expressive book that celebrates the power of found family, of kindness and thoughtfulness to turn the most broken of things around and of connection to counter the corrosive idea that once we make a profoundly impactful mistake that there is no coming back from that.
Rather than throw its hands up in the air and admit to the false idea that all we deserve in the dim light of loss, grief and heartache is a shadowy version of life as we once knew it, How to Read a Book dares to imagine a future where real healing happens, where real consequences are addressed in painful but ultimately redemptive ways and where the future, once consigned to the dustbin of impossible-to-happen good things, might just buoyantly burst back to life, surprising and delightful as it does.