'Accidental' is about family, hope

Jean Reynolds Page's book is about the rhythms of life and the possibilities of change

DAN HAYS
January 30, 2005

Calm sometimes can be anything but.

Take a look at this:

"I finished one cognac, had the impulse to pour another one, and decided to let it ride for the night. I was drinking too much lately, even before Reese's blunt arrival. I needed something else to anesthetize myself. Mindless sex hadn't exactly done the trick. Booze didn't seem to be much better. My last hope was the religion thing. Maybe that was the ticket."

Those are words of a widow in "Accidental Happiness," a book about the ordinary things in life adding up to the extraordinary. The widow also muses:

"It took so much effort to reinvent my world without Ben, and these new problems -- they didn't help at all. Only after Benjamin was gone did I realize how much I'd counted on him to decide who I was. Together, we'd been a step ahead of the world. Without him, I'd fallen so far behind."

There is a particularly important word there: together.

Ultimately, that word expresses the surface of what this complex and moving novel is all about.

It is about family and hope. But there is nothing obvious or outworn in this calmly paced story. There only is the everyday reality of life and the things change can bring us -- if only we'll allow it.

The story centers on Gina Melrose, who just lost her husband, Ben.
She has moved onto their boat to retreat from the world. And then Reese arrives, Angel in tow.

Reese was Ben's first wife, and Angel just might be his child.

Whatever else is on Melrose's mind, the arrival of mother and child forces her back into life and forces her to begin to think in terms of future and possibilities.
Page writes with surpassing grace. Her novel moves to its own rhythm, finds its own place in the mind and heart of the reader. It may be no accident that Page, who lives on Washington's Mercer Island, is a journalist who has written a good deal about dance.

The characters in this book relate with the same sort of complexity dancers employ. They think and feel in a physical rhythm that makes the book both calm and startling.

And always, there are surprises, sudden flashes of wit or truth or memory that come leaping off the page and leave the reader wide-eyed. Here's one of them:
"'I'm sorry about Mr. Melrose,' the [preacher's] wife said. 'I didn't know him but I read about it when he was killed. It was a terrible accident.'

"Reese nodded. The woman regarded her with open suspicion. That preacher's wife thing didn't guarantee any smiles from this one. Reese had seen animals that had been mistreated. In Diane Hanes's eyes, Reese saw the look of some of those animals. Reese couldn't help believing that whatever had gone wrong in her life, it was her own damn fault. Her husband seemed nothing but solid and good."

On the surface, this is what is known as "a woman's novel." It even has touches of the traditional romance about it. It will no doubt be marketed with all that in mind.

But it is a book that almost carves out its own ground -- "almost" because it does have some predecessors, including Page's "A Blessed Event."

"Accidental Happiness" is a successful attempt to achieve the significance of "serious literature" within the confines of a popular novel. Its story is simple, the outline of its plot almost too dramatic.

But the reality of this novel is much more than that suggests. It is moving, involving and burrows deeply into things most of us don't like to think about.
The surface, once again, is calm. But after reading this book, "calm" and "complex" will seem like words meant to be together. There's that word again.

Together.