This book. THIS BOOK.

Sometimes you pick up a book because you should; it got some stars (or, in this case, failed to get some stars), some people liked the authors other books, you’re sitting around portioning out the books and it’s your turn to take something off the pile. I read a lot of should books — that’s being a youth services librarian, basically — and mostly I am glad, because it makes me better at my job, and mostly the books are good, because lots of books are good, if you give them chance, but mostly they aren’t great.

And then, every now and again, you read a should book and it knocks your socks off. Like, across town lines off. You’ll never see those socks again, and you don’t care, because you’ve just fallen a little bit in love and that’s all that matters.

The Careful Undressing of Love, Corey Ann Haydu
Dutton, January 2017
Reviewed from ARC

This is magic realism, in a slightly alternate New York. It’s like New York through the best Instagram filter; every color is a little brighter, every shadow a little deeper, every detail you wanted to highlight sparkles right off the page. It’s not a false image, but it’s heightened.

In this New York, there’s a street in Brooklyn with a curse; any man who loves a woman who lives on the street for more than a year will die. It’s a street of widows and sadness, a street of tradition and love. It’s a street where girls share birthdays and never cut their hair and wear skeleton keys around their necks. It’s a street with the kind of filter that makes it realer than real, and makes everyone who doesn’t live there seem faded and dull in comparison.

Don’t you have chills already?

The voice here is amazing. Lorna’s voice is a little quiet, a little formal. It’s like drops hitting water; it’s not exactly musical, but there’s music under it, in her cadences and slightly unexpected phrasings. The language is sensuous and descriptive, and there’s a stillness. These sentences aren’t Hemingway short, but they rarely have more than two clauses, often only one, so they aren’t long. When sentences are longer, Haydu uses commas less than I think most writers would, and I don’t know exactly how that works but it changes the rhythms in ways that make the language sing. It’s a little old fashioned, or maybe timeless would be a better word, and yet thoroughly now — sex, sexism, fame for fames sake, the lack of privacy in a a digital world are all present and openly referenced, but without being tied to specifics. Most of all, the voice is refreshingly honest, especially when Lorna talks about sex or the way she loves being near but not in love. It’s a voice that seems totally frank and open and yet is lying — Lorna is lying to the reader, and to herself, about how well she has coped with the losses in her life. That’s some virtuoso voice work, and Haydu pulls this off with a small page count and a first person narrator.

And let’s talk about the losses: Lorna has attended 18 funeral in 17 years; she was held up as a poster child after a 9/11-like attack that killed her father; and she’s been worked on by Angelika and the other widows, whose love for tradition and superstitious beliefs prevent the natural course of grief. Moving on is not allowed, and Lorna believes she has owned that. She loves being a Devonairre Street girl. You can tell because she tells you. She loves how they are special and how people notice them and how it gives her a place to feel at home, especially after her father’s death. She loves it until the Curse hits a little too close to home and suddenly it’s scary and terrible and it all hurts. It all adds up to a powerful meditation on grief and the nature of love, and whether loving and losing or never loving is better. Love and sacrifice and loss twine together, and the portrait that emerges — not just of Lorna but of LornaCruzCharlotteDelilahIsla, of Devonairre Street and its grieving widows, of a city that can’t quite move past a tragedy — manages to be complex without overburdening the reader with details. The details that do make it in are so specific (the taste of Jack’s whiskey, the thousands of traditions, Owen’s boxers) that the sense of reality is intense despite the near total lack of other details (school, for one, or any life outside Devonairre Street). Thematically this is tight; setting wise it might be even tighter.

I said at the start that this is magic realism, but honestly I’m not even sure that label fits. I can’t think of a genre label that fits better, but the magic realism, such as it is, is about as understated as can be; there is maybe no magic, but there maybe is. Certainly there’s a kind of magic in Angelika, with her inexplicable accent and her tragic past and the control — both benign and malign — she wields over the widows and children of Devonairre Street. And there’s a magic in Haydu’s imagined rituals and their genesis; the lemons, the keys, the uncut hair and shared birthday. Like Delilah’s “you are more wonderful than rain;” made up, seemingly universal but actually specific and personal. Which is what struck me so hard about this book; it’s a made up story in a made up New York, and yet it felt true and painful.

And yet, zero stars. As the daughter of a dead father, maybe this resonated for me because I can so easily see how Devonairre Street, with its answers its Curse, would be immensely comforting and immensely stifling in the face of tragedy. But I don’t think it’s just personal resonance that has me cheering this one on. I believe this deserves to be at the table, picked apart in excruciating detail. It stood up to two reads for me, and while there are other books I loved, this is right up there for best of the year. There are a few things about the pacing around Jack’s death and the final tragedy that a reader might quibble with (I would argue that these are clear stylistic choices, rather than lazy writing, but that doesn’t mean it will work for all readers). And the ending is weirdly unsatisfying and yet exactly perfect, but in a way that left me a little unsettled. But these are minor flaws.

So either I missed something significant, or all those positive but not starred reviews were the curse of the January pub date (when you haven’t seen any other 2017 books, how do you assess a star that indicates relative merit in the context of the year?). If we were at the RealPrintz table, I’d be nominating this. So, shadow committee, it’s your turn to argue for or against my (very long!) why statement.