The Life Impossible is hard to believe
The Life Impossible
Matt Haig Viking
For millions of masked readers wringing their Purelled hands during the COVID summer of 2020, Matt Haig's novel The Midnight Library was an answer to a prayer. Dolly Parton kept it on her nightstand next to the Bible. Goodreads users voted it the year's best work of fiction.
The appeal was obvious: Haig's story describes a fantastical library that offers a suicidal young woman the chance to experience an infinite number of alternative lives.
Now Haig is back with another therapeutic fantasy. The heroine of The Life Impossible is a 72-year-old retired math teacher stuck brandishing the allegorical name Grace Winters. When the novel opens in England, Grace receives a letter from a depressed college kid who used to be one of her high school students. Things haven't gone well: His girlfriend dumped him. His mother died. He lost his faith. He's drinking too much. He's overwhelmed with anxiety, hopelessness and self-hatred.
Instead of encouraging him to find professional care, Grace describes her own salvation from a similar bout of depression in a 300-page email message.
“What I am about to tell you,” Grace begins, “is a story even I find hard to believe,” which makes two of us.
A few years after the death of her husband, Grace has run out of friends, family and money. She's never stopped blaming herself for the death of her 11-yearold son, who is described here in terms so generic he could be in the Sears Grief catalogue.
But then she receives an extraordinary inheritance: Christina, a woman she worked with briefly decades ago, has bequeathed her a house on Ibiza. Grace barely remembers her, but Christina never forgot the time Grace invited her over for Christmas and encouraged her to pursue a singing career.
Much of the novel follows Grace's efforts to solve Christina's disappearance and to overcome her crushing sense of inadequacy. Along the way, she stumbles upon a nefarious plot to destroy Es Vedrà, the rock formation off the coast of Ibiza that's been inspiring myths for millennia. And so the novel keeps evolving — from grief memoir to murder mystery to environmental battle, sliding along a slick surface of New Age truisms.
Admittedly, charming moments and light touches of wit run throughout, but they're overwhelmed by the story's commitment to refrigerator magnet inspiration. It all starts to taste like a tepid dish of coq au vin made from the plucked carcass of Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
I won't reveal whether Grace forgives herself and saves
Ibiza from a developer, but rest assured that by the end another angel gets its wings.