Alina Bronsky

Walter Schmidt wakes up one morning to find that his wife Barbara isn't in bed, and strangely he does not smell coffee brewing. He finds Barbara on the floor unable to get up. He helps her back to bed, and then he is stymied. Because Walter does not know how to boil water, much less make coffee. Over the course of the book we observe the humorous ways in which Walter must learn to run the household, while, poignantly it becomes apparent that something serious must be going on with Barbara, a fact that Walter refuses to recognize.

The book is comic, touching and sad, all at the same time. Walter is a curmudgeon--he's alienated the children, has few friends, and for much of their 50+ years of marriage has treated Barbara as pretty much a slave. But now, in her illness, he's trying really hard to do better (without ever admitting he did anything wrong in the first place). Bronsky is able to make us sympathize and root for this mostly unlikeable man. It's a very real portrait of a type of man of a certain age, not macho exactly, but one who has been catered to and waited on his whole life suddenly having to do the waiting on. And discovering how difficult it is to care--really care--for another person.

I loved this bittersweet book.

4 stars… (more)