JANET HALL

In this novel, a retired English teacher in a small Southern town struggles to accept the death of her ex-husband.

Janet Hall has moved back to Trion, Alabama, the intellectually cloistered hometown she fled to study literature. Decades ago, she married Jacob Hall, an ambitious fiction writer she’d met in high school. They eventually divorced—he wanted kids and she desired a life of independence, and Janet could no longer tolerate his serial infidelity. But 35 years later, they remain close friends, with their lives deeply enmeshed, both unable to cut the “umbilicus of passion,” a memorable coinage in Courington’s poetically nimble tale. Janet still loves Jacob and neglects to restore her maiden name, and he remains entirely dependent on her editorial oversight of his writing. Despite some success, he’s filled with remorse that he’s never published a major novel or lived up to the excited expectations of his childhood teachers. Janet is in Trion after inheriting a house from a relative. She threatens to cut off Jacob, who lives in Illinois, if he won’t join her, and then she learns he’s dead, apparently from a heart attack. But Janet begins to suspect that he killed himself—he valorized the suicide of great authors like Hemingway as an act of heroism. She becomes obsessed with discovering if she is ultimately responsible for his death, a desperate investigation poignantly portrayed by the author. Courington delicately explores the ways in which literature can emancipate or imprison those devoted to it—it can crush dreams of grandeur just as easily as it can conjure them. The author powerfully captures the impossibility of ever fully leaving one’s past behind, a lesson finally learned by Janet: “As a kid, I felt trapped here, and Jacob became my way out—the beginning of a life filled with hope and ideas, the vision of a new day. He said small towns are for the small-minded. And I agreed. But I’ve begun to realize that my world is like a worn Samsonite suitcase I carry wherever I go—scratched and dented with locks that can pop open at any time.” This is an affectingly melancholic work, laced with insights and communicated in a quietly meditative prose.

A deeply moving family tale written in a smoothly poetic style.