Remember the Neil Simon comedy the Out-of-Towners? It's been made into a movie a couple of times. The best way to describe this book is to compare it to that movie/play. A husband and wife travel to a funeral, and back home. The wife is as scatter-shot as they come. The husband is fact-driven. Yet they love each other and somehow stick together.
I admit I got bored with it about half way through. I stuck it out, but had to skim ahead, and then read the last two chapters. There just wasn't much driving the novel forward. From experience with these types of novels I knew that nothing was going to change, nothing of consequence was going to happen, for this odd couple. And I was right.
It would make an entertaining short story though, shortened to about four thousand words.
[...] much better novel, in my opinion, than Breathing Lessons, for which Anne Tyler won the Pulitzer. There were moments in Breathing Lessons when I just wished [...]
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