Cruel, Beautiful World

The title is apt, isn't it? Finally I can recommend a book that you can get right now. This tragic but gorgeously written novel by Caroline Leavitt has been languishing on my shelf for more than four years. I must have picked it up at some conference or book expo and thought I'd get to it when the spirit moved me. So glad it did.

The plot may sound like one that's been done a lot recently, especially in light of the Me Too movement but Leavitt actually got there first. The descriptive first sentence tells you exactly what happens,

 "Lucy runs away with her high school teacher, William, on a Friday, the last day of school, a June morning shiny with heat."

Can't you just see that Massachusetts day, "shiny with heat?" It will take Leavitt another three hundred fifty pages to dissect the repercussions of Lucy's rash decision, the pain that she'll cause her older sister Charlotte and her adopted mother Iris but it's in those pages that the beauty of this novel lies. It's as if

Leavitt has written several novellas within the whole as she deftly unspools each fully drawn character's backstory. She does an admirable job of characterizing William, his mesmerizing way with the students, his uncanny ability to zoom in on the least confident girl in the room with his blazing attention and make her feel brilliant.

We see how easily Lucy, a hapless romantic with dreams of being a writer, could fall under William's spell. After all, Charlotte was always the scholar in the family, the solid sister with her nose in her books, awarded a full ride to Brandeis. In her manic push toward graduation she took her eye off the ball, Lucy, the one she's felt responsible for since their parents died when she and Lucy were still small. 

And then there's the compelling Iris, a successful single woman on the cusp of retirement with dreams of world travel in her future. Imagine how her life was up-ended when she learned that she was the only living relative of her estranged father and his much younger wife. Could she place the girls in a home? Put them up for adoption? Of course not. And though the transition was rocky at first, the love they brought into her home was inestimable.

This finely crafted novel is psychologically astute in its examination of the slow uncoiling of an abusive personality and the difficulty of recognizing let alone leaving a dangerous relationship. Leavitt also ably characterizes the stages of grief through a young man trying to come to terms with his wife's untimely death and the mantle of guilt he's taken on. She looks at love in its many iterations and generously shares the joy with her readers until we come to accept that it is, in fact, both a cruel and beautiful world.