One of the buzziest literary phenomena of the year is the rise of the middle-age heroine. Miranda July’s perimenopausal epic, “All Fours”; Glynnis MacNicol’s hedonistic memoir, “I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself”; and Leslie Jamison’s post-divorce memoir, “Splinters,” all posit that women of a certain age aren’t past their prime and are discovering new frontiers all the time.
Matt Haig expands the trend with his new novel, “The Life Impossible.” The author — who is best known for his mega-best seller “The Midnight Library” — propels a 72-year-old retired teacher named Grace Winters from “the most boring life in the universe” (idling in her bungalow in England) to an odyssey of action and awe (solving the mystery of an old acquaintance’s death in Ibiza, the Spanish isle of late-night raves and nude beaches). It’s “Murder, She Wrote” meets “Under the Tuscan Sun,” or as Haig describes Grace: “Don Quixote dressed in Marks & Spencer.”
Grace is grappling with loss. She’s a recent-ish widow, and she’s also still grieving the death of her son, Daniel, who died three decades prior, when he was just 9 years old. Since losing her immediate family, her life has shrunk so drastically that “she only had two contacts on her WhatsApp — Angela from the British Heart Foundation and Sophie, her sister-in-law, who had moved to Perth in Australia 33 years ago.” This might have been maudlin, but Haig lightens the mood, including with cheeky chapter titles (Grace’s initial tale of woe arrives under the heading “Sob Story”).
The novel opens with a cry-for-help email from one of Grace’s former students, Maurice Augustine, who is despairing that “everything feels impossible.” The book we hold is Grace’s sprawling response. To comfort Maurice, she shares her own story about “a person who felt there was no point left in her existence, and then found the greatest purpose she had ever known.”
Her tale is set in motion by “an act of kindness long ago”: In 1979, Grace invited Christina Papadakis, a colleague she barely knew, to spend Christmas Day with her. When Christina vanishes and is presumed dead in Ibiza decades later, she leaves Grace, of all people, her shabby house and a trail of clues about her fate. Officially, Christina “died at sea” — or did she?
Cracking the case of Christina’s disappearance forces Grace, who self-soothes with tedious mental equations and thoughts on theorems, to open her logical mind to the paranormal. “The only thing you have to believe at this point is that there is a possibility that we don’t know every single thing about life in the universe,” Grace writes to Maurice. “Is that possible?” In attempting to convince Grace, Haig moved even this skeptical reader to consider that science and magic aren’t mutually exclusive.
Grace’s search for answers is filled with adventure (including a midnight scuba dive and a 2 a.m. club jaunt), comedy (via an enigmatic seaman named Alberto Ribas whose “general aesthetic seemed to be halfway between unrehabilitated caveman and pirate”) and vivid bursts of magical realism. Because of the novel’s framing, Grace will occasionally address her student amid the action, which can feel clunky. But the format largely excuses Grace’s penchant for platitudes (“To be alive is to be a life. To be life. We are life”) that could have been plucked from Haig’s 2021 meditation on hope, “The Comfort Book.” After all, she’s a teacher writing to a struggling student.
Grace moves other lonely people with her decency — what a humble and genuinely lovely concept! Though Grace engages in near-relentless self-loathing, Haig draws her with wisdom and heart. “People say that love is rare. I am not so sure,” she muses. “What is rare is something even more desirable. Understanding.”
A sinister hotel development plot and its predictable villain lack the juice of Grace’s arc: rediscovering kinship and pleasure, the simple wonders of “sunlight on floorboards” or “Harrison Ford’s face.” This is the most affecting message of “The Life Impossible”: that for Grace — even at 72 and after everything she’s been through — life is still possible.
The post Matt Haig’s New Novel Is a Love Letter Filled With Magic appeared first on New York Times.
