After You've Gone
By Jeffrey Lent
Atlantic Monthly Press
This is not the cover of the book I read. My daughter, seeing the image of a woman lying across a red book cover, asked, "WHAT are you reading?!" I heard the shock in her voice. It was a totally inappropriate cover for a charming if terribly sad book.
Yes, once again, I've read a sad book. Beautiful, though. This was a carefully written character study of a man going through grief. Not only did he miss the wife he had loved so well, he missed love. So he went to Amsterdam to take cello lessons after quitting the job he'd loved at a small women's college. Isn't that what we all want to do when faced with loss?
I liked this character for his response to the new woman in his life. I liked him for his newfound interest in the cello and his admiration for his cello teacher -- I even identified with this since I have been taking piano lessons. But from the beginning I knew it would be sad. It had to be; I knew it was about grief. But it only got sadder and sadder. And wrapped up in the final pages of the book -- I couldn't put it down in the final chapters -- I braced myself. I knew it would end in tragedy. The books I've read this year have been filled with tragedy. Why would this one be any different?
A final thought. I'm sick of reading these sad books. Thank you Washington Post for your list of 2009's best books but I'd really have enjoyed a bit of wry humor, a sentimental journey, a lesson learned, a moment of triumph over difficulty. Yes, I'll keep reading but there's no way I'll ever get through the whole list. I'm going to start tossing aside the really sad ones unless a character draws me in.
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