It is always a welcome thing when a novel completely and utterly subverts expectations.
Novels like Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore by Matthew Sullivan which, while sporting a back cover blurb that clearly announces there is darkness sitting at the heart of its immersively compelling narrative, gives off the sense that here is a quirky bookstore mystery in the offing.
And certainly as far as the setting goes, it is exactly what you expect it to be.
In what feels like ’90s Denver, Colorado, Lydia Smith works at the Bright Ideas Bookstore, a retailer of new books that was one of the first new businesses to colonise an area of the downtown which had long been rough, violent and crime ridden.
Reflecting its still down at heels look and feel of the area in which its situated, the bookstore is effectively home to an eclectic group of people from society’s margins known as BookFrogs, people who have found some sort of salvation in books which offer them sanctuary, diversion and escape.
One of those people is Joey, a withdrawn 20-year-old man who spends his days reading books – the bookstore closes at midnight and opens early so he can spend almost the entire day there – and watching the customers, searching, muses one bookstore employee, for some sense of family or belonging.
The only person that he ever meaningfully engages with is Lydia, possibly because she is an outlier herself, friendly with her colleagues and brilliantly good with customers but closely guarded and unwilling too much of herself, someone whom Joey possibly sees as a kindred spirit.
“‘Something’s wrong in the air, you know, when a book costs less than a bullet. Or a Coke. Values-wise.’
Lydia sighed in agreement. Joey touched the book between them, a gentle finger-tap.
‘These things saved my life,’ he said, in nearly a whisper. ‘That’s no small thing.’
‘You’re not alone there.'” (P. 52)
Just how much of a kindred spirit comes to the deeply unsettling fore when Lydia, responding to the oddly disquieting sound of books falling from shelves on one of the bookstore’s upper shelves, finds Joey hanging from a rafter, his short troubled life brought to a devastatingly sad, premature end.
In his pocket, and inexplicably so, is a photo of Lydia as a little girl, blowing out candles at her birthday party with close friends Raj Patel and Carole Oates gathered around her; this discovery leads to a rapid unraveling of Lydia’s own troubled past which is far more horrific than anyone around her knows.
Or do they?
Because Joey knew something, and somehow got a photo of her he should never have had access to, and as Lydia tries to work out what he knew and how, and why that would have driven him to take his own life, it becomes more and more clear to her that there is lot more going on than meets the eye, and that her locked-away, painful past is racing up to meet, and mix chaotically with, her hiding in plain sight present.
It’s at this point that any semblance of a cosy bookstore mystery goes flying out the proverbial window but you care not one bit because Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore soon reveals itself to be one of those captivatingly good books that is something beguilingly, enticingly original, a mystery with layer upon layer but also a great deal of broken humanity at its darker-than-expected heart.
It is this resonant humanity that makes Matthew Sullivan’s debut novel such an arrestingly story to read.
The mystery, which centres around books and the way they have brought comfort to Joey, Lydia and her estranged father, is reassuringly cosy in so far as it is a love letter to the power of reading and the amazing ability that books have to change the most impossibly awful of circumstances.
In this respect, the bookstore, its lovable but eccentric staff and the BookFrogs who inhabit it like a second home – or really, a first home for many of them – are a reaffirmation that life can be saved, at least in part by the power of the written word to reorient perspective, bring comfort to battered hearts and to furnish escape when reality becomes overwhelmingly too terrible to bear.
But Sullivan doesn’t pretend for one moment that this is the end of the story; in fact, while he lovingly reinforces how much of a different reading and literature can make to a person – without it, Joey, and possibly even Lydia might have made it this far – he is also refreshingly and brutally honest about the toll that trauma and loss have on people.
There’s no magic wand you can wave to fix everything or a passage from a book that fix the ailing soul, and Sullivan knows and communicates this with poignancy and a commitment to truthfulness that will have you gasping at the grim reality of it all.
“One of the duties shared by Lydia’s comrades was to periodically run a returns report through the inventory system and use it to unshelve books that hadn’t sold in months and return them to the publisher. The idea was to cut out whatever titles might be bogging down business, but Lydia would play no part in such a cruel practice. In fact, after many failed attempts at rehabilitation, she was no longer allowed to participate in the returns process at all because each time she’d done so she’d been caught intentionally losing pages from her lists or misshelving favored books in order to spare them from the gallows. She just couldn’t avoid taking it personally: sending a choice title back to the publisher was like sending a perfectly good pooch to the pound, knowing it would be euthanized.” (PP. 160-161)
For all it grimness however, there is a charming aspect to Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore that will entrance you throughout, thanks to some pitch perfect characterisation, and a resolute sense of time and place that anchors some of the more intense moments in the plot.
By anchoring Lydia in a world where she is listened to and loved by quirky colleagues, supported by a caring boyfriend who gets her in a way few others do, and where she works in a place that gives you a fixed sense of welcoming place, all of the darker moments, which fuel a gripping narrative, don’t seem forever damning.
Yes, there is a great deal of pain and loss that Lydia, and others, have to grapple with, and it means that the novel feels ominously mysterious at times, and heartrendingly so, but it never feels like people’s lives are completely beyond repair.
Damaged and broken, yes, and certainly Joey is taken tragically under the by the weight of the grief and loss his brief life has sustained, but not beyond redemption, at least Lydia isn’t, not yet, and as this cleverly-constructed and brilliantly deployed heartfelt mystery plays out, and takes you heart and mind willingly along with it, you are seized by the idea that life can be distressingly bleak and broken but that there is perhaps some sort of light at the end of terrifyingly twisting and turning tunnel.
Matthew Sullivan has triumphed with Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore, a novel which seamlessly mixes darkness and light, charm and menace, estrangement and betrayal with belonging and inclusion, all wrapped up in a charmingly intense blend of mystery, mounting dread and renewal, and threaded through with a puzzling narrative that will grip right to the very last enthralling page.