DAYS OF WONDER, by Caroline Leavitt
When the unfairness of life overwhelms you, does it bring out your grit and resolve, or send you down a rabbit hole of grievance and desperation?
Such is the crossroads facing three deeply damaged people in Caroline Leavitt’s 12th novel, “Days of Wonder”: Ella Fitchburg, newly released from prison after being convicted of trying to poison her wealthy boyfriend’s father; her teenage love, Jude, a victim of domestic abuse who’s lugging his own millstone of guilt; and Ella’s mother, Helen, who was cruelly cast out of her Hasidic Jewish community as a pregnant teenager.
Ella, too, is pregnant when she begins her 25-year sentence, but is pressed to give the baby girl up for adoption. Freed nearly two decades early thanks to a governor’s intervention, Ella, now 22, tracks down the child, who has been adopted and named Carla, and hastily moves from Brooklyn to Ann Arbor, Mich., to be close to her — without disclosing her real identity to her daughter’s new parents. A cross between Sylvia Plath’s sardonic Esther Greenwood and Allison McKenzie from “Peyton Place” (the Mia Farrow iteration), Ella mostly covets security and a bigger place in the world, clinging to a deluded dream of her, Jude, Carla and a life they can never have.
All along we feel Ella’s deep longing, her pain at having been so spectacularly cheated by life. Alas, that doesn’t prevent her from coming off as a creepy stalker: She hides in a back booth at the bar where her daughter’s new dad works, pops up like a disturbed jack-in-the-box to sneak cellphone pictures of Carla and anonymously leaves knitted mittens in the family mailbox.
We’re also asked to sustain some serious suspension of disbelief. Despite a closed adoption, Ella quickly discovers her daughter’s location when a lawyer sloppily exposes a file with the family’s address; Ella meets Carla after the little girl’s errant ball miraculously rolls in front of her feet at a playground, a trope for the ages. Perhaps most ludicrous: With zero experience Ella lands a job as a freelance “Dear Abby”-style columnist for a weekly newspaper in Ann Arbor and is able to support herself on it. That’s worthy of the same eyeroll we collectively delivered when Carrie Bradshaw was somehow able to afford all those Cosmos and pricey shoes.
Leavitt is clearly in her element here: Her previous novels are a soapy collection of women experiencing pain, regret and, ultimately, redemption. But the task of untangling the characters’ myriad secrets and the foggy mystery that binds Ella, Jude and Helen together is harrowing, and leads to some cutting of corners (Ella’s alacrity at becoming best friends with Carla’s adoptive mother seems a tad convenient). It also results in a denouement that feels as overly tidy and soulless as a sample home.
While it moves intermittently between the trio’s individual story lines, the narrative is largely driven by Ella — Jude and Helen seem to serve as more of a supporting cast, present to both reflect her pain and mark the road of broken promises she’s trudged. The sometimes clichéd plotting is helped by Leavitt’s graceful prose: Ella sees her mother as “a dry, twisted sponge that could no longer expand”; falling for the high school dreamboat Jude, she finds herself out of her depth in his social circle, not knowing “how to dress in the casually-mussed way of the teenage elite”; upon release from prison, she threads her way through a throng of reporters, “their voices like thorns.”
The novel’s title is a tad misleading; the book is far less about wondrous days than about the tenacity required to survive life’s bad ones. Ultimately — and despite enough melodrama for “General Hospital” — it heralds the power of steady perseverance, sturdy faith and the raw restorative power of love.
DAYS OF WONDER | By Caroline Leavitt | Algonquin | 320 pp. | $29
