Reluctantly, and with embarrassment, Edward looks at the dozens of responses to his ad - some of them perfumed, some of them misspelled, a few of them somewhat promising. He goes to dinner with a hard-edged lady in a miniskirt; to brunch with a sweeter woman who, unfortunately, is still preoccupied with her late husband; and to drinks with an older woman who startles and repels him with her plastic surgery-fake appearance. The whole experience is enough to send him running back to the woods, where he can look at the birds in peace. And there it is! A hobby he once enjoyed, returned to him.
But Wolitzer doesn't leave him there, peering through his binoculars alone. In a way, it's a shame she didn't. Often a novel's tension, or its sense of forward motion, begins to sag by the midway point, and thankfully that doesn't happen in this one. Wolitzer is too good at what she does for that. But the thrust of her story, and something of the quality of the way she tells it, do change, and rather abruptly. We turn a page and learn that Edward has turned a page in his grief, so to speak, and from that point on the romantic intrigue begins in earnest. This new tale is less tender, less introspective than the one we started out reading. It's cluttered with flirty e-mails, meaningful looks, phone numbers jotted on supermarket receipts. If you find the sillier details of "dating" boring, at any age, you won't care much for all this.
