ANNA Quindlen’s latest novel is an unlikely love story of a 60-year-old woman who rediscovers herself when she leaves the city (and her past life) to live a secluded life in a small town. Beautifully titled Still Life with Bread Crumbs, the book is chiefly concerned with the importance of love in an increasingly denatured world where there is a momentary time lapse between actual human experience and its perception, much as there is in taking a photo­graph.

Rebecca Winter is a photo­grapher who had accidently become an icon for a women’s movement a few decades ago. Like any has-been artist she finds herself in financial straits and decides to sublet her beloved Manhattan apartment to provide for her son Ben and her mother who is suffering from dementia and lives in an elderly home.

In order to cut down her expenses and get a breather from urban life she rents a cabin with a splendid view, which turns out to be a “ramshackle cottage in a hollow halfway up the mountain”. A city creature through and through, Rebecca encounters problems — a raccoon on the roof, power breakdowns, and spoiled firewood — which she would have found inconceivable in the past.

This, however, is not the end of her troubles as Rebecca is also saddened by her failed marriage. Her English ex-husband, Peter, is a typical male chauvinist professor who doesn’t only say everything dryly but is also lacking in empathy. In her new, lonely house Rebecca has the time to look back at her past life and in hindsight she sees that “it was his very carelessness that she had initially found so attractive, as though to snag his attentions for even a moment was a sign of worth”.

Rebecca, who does not exactly think of herself as a motherly figure, has relaxed into her role as a mother. Her mother, however, has “never relaxed into anything, especially motherhood. She was as definite, as unyielding, as dark as the ungainly statue of Artem that she had placed on the table in their old apartment’s foyer”.

On a subconscious level, Rebecca holds a grudge against her mother for depriving her of the warmth and love that every child deserves. She is awkward around people and has only one close friend. Her syntax, she feels, is “stiff and old-fashioned because, when she was growing up, her mother had made slang, even contractions, seem like obscenities”.

It is through the kindness of strangers that Rebecca starts to settle into her new place. She meets Sarah, a quirky tea-shop owner who loves to talk and gossip but has a heart of gold, and Tad, an unsuccessful but supremely talented clown. Sadly, this promising tale of a middle-aged woman’s self-discovery mutates into a clichéd romance when Rebecca falls for Jim Bates, a macho, tool-belted roofer and hunter with a sad past. Like in any small-town story there is also the alcoholic and abusive husband, Kevin, whose only purpose is to make the hero look more kind and desirable. Although these people don’t amount to much more than flat, clichéd characters, they are not altogether boring.

Moreover, Quindlen’s narrative is sprinkled with humorous titbits which are funny and understated: “It has turned out that climbing a tree was more difficult than the warrior pose in yoga, than teaser in Pilates, than the elliptical or the Reformer. Rebecca thought that if no one had thought of it yet, soon enough someone in the city would spearhead a craze for tree climbing in Central and Prospect Parks, and it would become the talk of every cocktail party: ‘have you tried that large oak by the Sheep Meadow? Oh, it’s totally changed my body’. Living in close proximity to nature brings home the fact that her life had been limited to the two-dimensional world as “she had learned to see what things looked like but not what they amounted to”.

The omniscient narrator keeps hinting at future developments: “sometimes things have to come when you’re ready for them. Rebecca Winter, who knew that well, was about to learn it even better”. However, these psychic interruptions became really annoying when one reads “but that was later” for what seems like the hundredth time.

For a read that seemed promising in the beginning, the neatly tied, happy ending was too much for me. I won’t go so far as to categorise it as chick lit, but the book has a very summery, Hollywood family drama feel to it and would probably make a good film. It would also make a great beach read or travel companion as a light, yet well-written novel. In short, Still Life with Bread Crumbs is a fine book with superb prose but a predictable plot. 

Still Life with Bread Crumbs

(NOVEL)

By Anna Quindlen

Random House, US

ISBN 978-0812976892

288pp.