There's Georgie's take on a Nebraska Christmas, for instance, which will elicit dark laughter in anyone still traumatized by the past winter: "How could people live someplace that so obviously didn't want them? All that romance about snow and seasons … you shouldn't have to make a special effort not to die every time you left your house." We mostly exist in the middle of life, not the beginning or ending. And yet it's just as readable, and, more importantly, the books have the same funny, tender effervescence, each of them packed with a thousand little truths about the world. We never learn the fate of the new TV show that keeps her in L.A., either, and consequently much of "Landline" feels unearned, its emotional payoff satisfying only because we care about Georgie's beleaguered, loving, lifelike marriage, not because we care about this particular moment in her life, or this particular magical telephone.įor that reason, if you're unfamiliar with Rowell's work, it might be better to start with "Eleanor & Park." That book, seamlessly plotted, its teen protagonists superbly human, seems to me destined to become a classic. Yes, she has a marriage to save, but it always feels as if she'd be better off doing that in 2013. The trouble is that Georgie doesn't have any especially urgent business to conduct in 1998 (though I did spend most of the book rooting for her to call in an order for some shares of AAPL). Feeling guilty, she calls them on "an antique, yellow rotary phone," only to discover that she's calling from 2013 to 1998 - to the version of Neal with whom she first fell in love. The phone belongs to Georgie, a television comedy writer in Los Angeles, who's forced at the last minute to skip a Christmas trip to Omaha, to the dismay of her husband Neal and their two daughters. It leans heavily on a gimmick that never quite succeeds, a magical telephone.
With all that said: Plot does matter to a novel's quality, and in that respect "Landline" is imperfect. Her work is dense with moments of sharp observation (a man's newly cut hair feels like "velvet one way and needles the other") and humor (considering possible careers, a character dismisses "Indian chief" - "don't have the connections," he says ruefully), and as the pages pass they can make her seem far more vibrant and alive than the colorless, even-toned writers whose strict obeisance to good literary taste might earn them greater cultural respect. And yet to skip her work because of its rom-com sheen would be to miss out on the kind of swift, canny honesty of that passage, which is typical of the pleasures of "Landline" - it's a book that's a joy from sentence to sentence, and on that intimate level there's absolutely nothing unoriginal or clichéd in the way Rowell thinks.
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