Lively wrote this book when she was my age, nearly 78, and it is a wonderful example of the mature writer at the height of her story-telling prowess.  The epigram that begins the book is a quote from James Gleick’s 1991 book ‘Chaos’ and reads as follows:  “The Butterfly Effect was the reason. For small pieces of weather–and to a global forecaster small can mean thunderstorms and blizzards—any prediction deteriorates rapidly.  Errors and uncertainties multiply, cascading upward through a chain of turbulent features, from dust devils and squalls up to continent-size eddies that only satellites can see.”  And as she did in her eponymous short story in ‘Beyond the Blue Mountains’, Lively takes this concept of chaos and distant random effects to the limit in this wonderful story of a ‘lively’ (forgive me!) cast of characters.

The butterfly in this novel is a 14 year old mugger who knocks poor Charlotte Rainsford down on the street relieving her of her purse and breaking her hip.  Because Charlotte is in hospital, her daughter Rose has to abandon her trip to Manchester accompanying her employer, Sir Henry Peters who was invited to lecture on 18th C. political history at the University there.  Because Rose is not organizing the trip, Sir Henry asks his niece Marion to accompany him which she does so.  Because she’s not fully engaged with her uncle’s affairs, Marion forgets to bring his notes and Sir Henry is humiliated at the University leading him to pursue a television career.  In addition, Marion leaves a message on the phone of Jeremy Dalton with whom she is having an affair. Jeremy’s wife, Stella, picks up Jeremy’s phone before he can delete Marion’s message and finding the message that ends “I love you”, she goes ballistic and launches divorce proceedings.  Meanwhile, Charlotte, an accomplished teacher now retired, takes on Anton, an Eastern European accountant who wishes to learn to read English, meeting him at Rose’s home where she is recovering from her broken hip and where Rose and Anton eventually fall in love.  Laura, Mark, George Harrington, and a few others play supporting roles in this touching and often funny story of how life unfolds unpredictably and quite possible influenced by that butterfly in the Amazon.

Lively (the author, not the adverb) has an optimistic though not sentimental view of life and people, gently chuckling at their foibles and taking pleasure in their occasionally successful relationships.  She does ‘new love’ exceptionally well both in this book and in ‘The Road to Lichfield’, and balancing that out, she also does adultery and divorce quite nicely, too.  She also has many of her characters be devout readers and Charlotte Rainsford certainly fills that bill.  Here’s Lively’s description of Charlotte who was separated from her library while at Rose’s:  Forever, reading has been central, the necessary fix, the support system.  Her life hs been informed by reading. She has read not just for distraction, sustenance, to pass the time, but she has read in a state of primal innocence, reading for enlightenent, for instruction, even.  She has read to find out how sex works, how babies are born, she has read to discover what it is to be good, or bad; she has read to find out if things are the same for others as they are for her—then, discovering that frequently they are not, she has read to find out what it is that other people experience that she is missing….Thus, has reading wound in with living, each a complement to the other.  Charlotte knows herself to ride upon a great sea of words, of language, of stories, and situations and information, of knowledge, some of which she can summon up, much of which is half lost, but  is in there somewhere, and has had an effect on who she is and how she thinks. She is as much a product of what she has read as of the way in which she has lived; she is like millions of others built by books, for whom books are an essential foodstuff, who could starve without.”  That’s real writing!

Read this book to have the fun of finding out what happens to Charlotte, Rose, Anton, Sir Henry, Marion, Jeremy, Stella and the others. You won’t regret it.