Don\u2019t expect a have-a-good-cry-and-catharsis tale from Packer, who excels in diamond-hard dissections of tangled personal relations. She embeds the narrative in the perceptions of Eliot, who is blindsided when his wife, Claire, tells him that she wants her two best friends to take care of her in these final months, \u201cinstead of you.\u201d It seems an unbelievably cruel demand; Eliot has been her caretaker through nearly nine grim years. He agrees, confident that \u201cHolly and Michelle would need him for the bad moments\u2026Claire would need him. She couldn\u2019t see it now.\u201d This thought should be a clue that there\u2019s more going on here than a dying woman\u2019s caprice, and the hints pile up from there in stray comments by friends, the couple\u2019s adult children, and Eliot\u2019s own recollections of past moments of tension in what was unquestionably a loving marriage. A retired management consultant, he wants to manage situations and avoid conflict: \u201cYou\u2019re like\u2026amenable,\u201d says son Josh. \u201cExcept when you\u2019re not.\u201d Packer mercilessly prods Eliot toward enlightenment about his character and Claire\u2019s feelings. Readers are likely to share his frustration with his wife\u2019s attitude, which can be summarized as, \u201cIf you don\u2019t get it, I can\u2019t explain it,\u201d until they realize she\u2019s just too sick to deal with other people\u2019s issues. Nothing is simple in a Packer novel: Emotional and power dynamics among Eliot, Holly, and Michelle shift on a near-daily basis, while Claire at the center keeps insisting that her decision has nothing to do with her love for her husband, and Josh and sister Abby referee from the sidelines. The final pages are as deliberately unresolved as the rest of the novel. Packer\u2019s unsparing gaze would be hard to take if her characters weren\u2019t so believably, messily, hurtfully human.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Don\u2019t expect a have-a-good-cry-and-catharsis tale from Packer, who excels in diamond-hard dissections of tangled personal relations. She embeds the narrative in the perceptions of Eliot, who is blindsided when his wife, Claire, tells him that she wants her two best friends to take care of her in these final months, \u201cinstead of you.\u201d It seems […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":4812,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4811","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4811"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4811"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4811\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}