The Beginner's Goodbye (First Look)

I know it will sound strange, but I finally felt good enough to go to the doctor today.  Actually, I first went to the office and put in five hours of catch-up effort, physically crashed, and then managed to make my way to one of those pharmacy clinics where I was prescribed some 60 antibiotic pills to take over the next ten days.  I feel so awful right now that I probably won't be heading back to work until Thursday morning, at the earliest.  But, hey, I made a huge dent in what was stacked up and got everything done that was due by the end of February.

But here's some really good news.  I am a huge Anne Tyler fan, having read every novel she has written over her long career, and in today's mail I received an Advance Reader's Edition of her latest book, The Beginner's Goodbye.  This one is to be published in April and has this to say about itself:

Crippled in his right arm and leg, Aaron has spent his childhood fending off a sister who wants to manage him.  So when he meets Dorothy, a plain, outspoken, independent young woman, she is like a breath of fresh air.  Unhesitatingly, he marries her, and they have a relatively happy, unremarkable marriage.

But when a tree crashes into their house and Dorothy is killed, Aaron feels as though he has been erased forever.  Only Dorothy's unexpected appearances from the dead help him to live in the moment and to find some peace.  And gradually he discovers that maybe for this beginner there is a way of saying good bye.

A beautiful, subtle exploration of loss and recovery, pierced throughout with Anne Tyler's humor, wisdom, and always penetrating look at human foibles.

 Considering that my fiction-reading-ratio favors men authors by more than a 2-1 margin over women authors, it was unlikely that I would so completely fall in love with the fiction of Anne Tyler and Joyce Carol Oates the way I have, but the pair of them (different as they are) have been two of my top four favorite authors for over three decades now.  Ms. Tyler is much less prolific (as in not prolific at all) than Ms. Oates when it comes to releasing titles, so this is good day - and this one might just jump to the top of my monster-sized TBR stack.