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A review by bjr2022
An Available Man by Hilma Wolitzer
4.0
I was introduced to Hilma Wolitzer's work through her new anthology of short stories Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket and chose to read An Available Man because it was her next most recent book (2012). I really enjoyed it, but it makes me even more eager to see her next book, now that Wolitzer is in her nineties and still writing strong.
An Available Man is about a happily married man who is widowed, with step-children who remain "his children," and how he negotiates "dating after death." It's about people who live normal domestic lives and grapple with love, loss, and loneliness (alliteration in honor of Wolitzer's fun-making of same in personals ads—the humor in this book is gentle and kind).
In any other hands, a story like this might bore me after a while because it is from the normal-domestic-lives side of the street that I have never inhabited. But I'm suspecting that anything Hilma Wolitzer writes will excite me. As with her short stories, here she writes real people. There is no nicey-nice, no airbrushing, no Hallmark anything. So for me, inhabiting the life of protagonist Edward Schuyler and his family was like re-education into what normalcy can be—no horrendous violence; there is a little insanity from a former girlfriend, but honestly, by the time she came along, I was so wallowing in normal love that she is the only character I wanted to get away from.
I cannot wait for Hilma Wolitzer's next book. I have no doubt it will be an honest, vibrant look at life and love in your nineties and my mouth waters at the prospects of the secrets I'll learn.
An Available Man is about a happily married man who is widowed, with step-children who remain "his children," and how he negotiates "dating after death." It's about people who live normal domestic lives and grapple with love, loss, and loneliness (alliteration in honor of Wolitzer's fun-making of same in personals ads—the humor in this book is gentle and kind).
In any other hands, a story like this might bore me after a while because it is from the normal-domestic-lives side of the street that I have never inhabited. But I'm suspecting that anything Hilma Wolitzer writes will excite me. As with her short stories, here she writes real people. There is no nicey-nice, no airbrushing, no Hallmark anything. So for me, inhabiting the life of protagonist Edward Schuyler and his family was like re-education into what normalcy can be—no horrendous violence; there is a little insanity from a former girlfriend, but honestly, by the time she came along, I was so wallowing in normal love that she is the only character I wanted to get away from.
I cannot wait for Hilma Wolitzer's next book. I have no doubt it will be an honest, vibrant look at life and love in your nineties and my mouth waters at the prospects of the secrets I'll learn.