AFTER DAVID

In Texier’s novel, a woman seeks love, romance, and a connection to her former self in the world of dating apps.

Eve is a 62-year-old French woman living in New York. Long divorced from David, her ex-husband and the father of her two daughters, Eve finds herself dipping her toe into online dating. She matches with younger men, receiving many messages until one from Jonah, aged 37, stops her in her tracks. Eve and Jonah embark on an uneven love affair that oscillates between being adoring and distant, with questions about age, careers, and maturity roiling at its center. Readers are often hard-pressed to find unapologetic, fulfilled, mature female leads in fiction; Eve, as a character, is a refreshing antidote to the all-too-frequent erasure of older women in the media, one who delights in sex, friendship, and travel. Texier does not make her too self-assured; Eve is confident, but she still suffers the pitfalls of modern dating and an uncertainty that often calls into question her marriage to David and her other serious, long-since-ended relationship with a man named Vadik. Eve declares passionately, with great resonance, “I didn’t aspire at all to a life without desire. Wouldn’t life be dreary without us putting a spell on each other?” While Texier’s message is welcome, the novel’s vignettelike approach to storytelling occasionally feels a little too much like a stream-of-consciousness ramble—not quite the voyage of discovery the narrative was perhaps intended to be. The men in Eve’s life often loom like shadows despite her independence, which makes the ending of the story feel not as convincing as readers might hope. Still, the meandering narrative reminds readers, quite bracingly, that women above the age of 50 are not fading into the twilight of their lives—they’re still discovering themselves.

A fascinating and sexy heroine sets this romance novel with a difference alight.