The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, by Gabrielle Zevin

It’s hard for a book lover to resist a novel set in a bookstore, which was my justification for buying both this novel and Tom Rachman’s The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, which I’ll review next. Although, since I bought both as e-books, I’m really part of the problem that plagues A.J. Fikry’s Island Books, rather than part of the solution.

A man clinging to a bricks-and-mortar bookstore  as the rest of the world shifts away from reading paper books — a man clinging to memories of his dead wife as the rest of the world moves forward — that’s A. J. Fikry. He appears initially as a cantakerous, grumpy, difficult-to-know man, a young widower locked in his grief and unwilling to engage with anyone in the world outside. But this novel can easily be read as a twenty-first century retelling of George Eliot’s Silas Marner: the lonely man, isolated from the community, is first shattered by the theft of his most valuable possession, then drawn back into life by the arrival of a small child abandoned in his shop.

It’s this latter fact — the arrival of toddler Maya in A.J.’s life — that’s most difficult to update from the original story, because while it was quite plausible in nineteenth-century England that an abandoned child might just end up living with the person whose house she wandered into, that obviously wouldn’t run as smoothly today, what with child welfare and adoption laws and stuff. Zevin skims over the legalities of this pretty lightly, doing the bare minimum necessary to make it just slightly believable that A.J. Fikry might end up raising this child. It helps if you suspend your disbelief a little at this point.

The Storied Life is a simple book telling a simple tale. It’s not much different, in fact, from the plot of many a romance novel (though the story takes us well past the happily-ever-after into a bittersweet and very realistic ending). The writing is lovely, and the bookstore setting combined with the little pieces of short-story analysis at the beginning of each chapter, ostensibly written by A.J. as a reading guide for his daughter, remind us that this is as much a story about stories, and power they have in our lives, as it is about A.J. Fikry and the people whose lives touch his.

Also, it’s a lot more fun to read than Silas Marner. And if you haven’t read Silas Marner, just trust me on that one.