Coming Back to Me, by Caroline Leavitt.
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001.
$24.95 - 320 pages.

We savor some books for their predictability. When we read the Dave Robicheaux novels of James Lee Burke, for example, we don’t want Robicheaux solving murders in New York, but down in Cajun Country.

We enjoy other books because their characters surprise us, take us completely off our guard. One such novel is Caroline Leavitt’s Coming Back To Me.

Leavitt’s story is simple enough on the surface. Molly, a primary school teacher, and Gary, a bookcover designer, fall in love and marry. They are delighted when Molly becomes pregnant. The baby, Otis, is healthy at birth, but medical complications leave Molly comatose and on the edge of death. Distraught, Gary must face a swarm of problems: dealing with the baby, hiring a full-time sitter, losing his job because of a supervisor jealous of his talent, trying to oversee his wife’s medical care, paying not only the usual bills but trying to work out Molly’s medical expenses as well.

Finally, Gary calls Suzanne, Molly’s estranged sister, and asks for her help in taking care of the baby. Suzanne’s presence solves the question of who will help care for Otis, for although Suzanne has no children, has led a jumbled life, and seems completely helpless at caring for herself, much less a baby, she eventually comes to love Otis. Yet, her arrival brings other dilemmas: a boyfriend with problems, a growing fondness for Gary, past resentments toward her mother and her sister.

One particularly fine feature about Coming Back To Me, as noted above, is the author’s ability to surprise the reader with unexpected changes in her characters and their situations, changes that seem upon reflection both natural and logical. Nearly all of the characters in this novel experience some metamorphosis, some interior alteration as a result of their circumstances. Suzanne, for instance, is exposed to several varieties of love, from the friendship offered by a neighborhood man to the lust and obsessed self absorbtion of her boyfriend, from the compassionate love aroused by Gary to the deep spiritual love felt toward Otis. Gary, too, must undergo a sort of trial by fire, finding that every aspect of his life - friends, family, job, happiness - is altered or called into question by his wife’s seemingly fatal illness.

Another attractive aspect of Leavitt’s novel is her treatment of minor characters. None of them are cardboard cutouts; none of them are present merely to fill space. The neighbors, the first babysitter Greta, the hospital staff - Leavitt has drawn them all as if they counted, as if they mattered to the story, and so we the readers treat them that way. As the novel progresses, we therefore learn, as Gary and Suzanne learn, to withhold initial judgments of these people for fear of being mistaken. Greta, for example, seems at first a Nazi nurse, a German-speaking woman obsessed with cleanliness and feeding schedules, a sort of baby whisperer who is convinced that Otis is praying for his parents, but we soon see a tenderness to her personality - Greta builds bridges to Gary’s neighbors, and she has deep feelings for both Otis and Gary.

Some few moments in Coming Back To Me don’t ring quite true. In an Independence Day scene involving a neighborhood parade, it seems unlikely that Gary would care enough about his neighbor Carl shooting off fireworks to threaten calling the police. The medical explanations for Molly’s illness and treatments are often vague; when the doctors first learn that Molly has medical complications through internal bleeding, Molly’s obstetrician, Karen, tells Gary that they “... had opened her up ... had scooped out what they could ... had sewn her back up.” There is no indication that the surgeons searched for the cause of the bleeding.

Yet these are minor quibbles. Caroline Leavitt has written an engrossing story of human beings under pressure, of what it means to be family, of different degrees of love. She has given us a story, a fine readable story about morality but without the lectures, a tale for our time that begins with despair and ends with redemption.

Here is the first of what I trust will be many good summer reads for all of us.

(Jeff Minick owns Saints and Scholars Bookstore on Main Street in Waynesville.)

 

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