IT ALL COMES DOWN TO THIS

Love, lies, and long-buried secrets surface as a favored family summer home in Maine is put up for sale.

The title is something of a giveaway in Fowler’s latest, a story of problems endured over many years, sometimes at significant personal cost, but, once aired and shared, reaching self-evident solutions. Sisters Beck, Claire, and Sophie Geller, with their contrasting careers and lifestyles, must come together after the loss of their mother, Marti, whose will requires them to sell the beloved summer cottage they have inherited, a remote house on Mount Desert Island. Sophie, who works in Manhattan’s art world but whose life has suddenly upended, needs the money the sale would bring. Claire, a doctor whose marriage has failed, could use the cash, too, but welcomes the distraction from unrequited love that the house brings. Beck, a journalist married to book editor Paul, wants to keep the house as a place in which to write the novel she’s longed to complete. Doing so would also liberate her from her kind but sexless marriage. Paul, meanwhile, has a secret—he yearns for Claire, and Claire (unbeknownst to Paul) yearns back. Marti kept secrets, too, and Beck has lied to Paul, both for financial and sexual reasons. She’s recently spent an amazing night with C.J. Reynolds, a figure from her past who has his own problematic backstory. Backstories indeed fill many pages in this exposition-heavy, distinctly soapy story, which devotes most of its attention to elaborating the problems set up to be unraveled. Fowler presents the family members in great detail; less so in the case of the perfunctory C.J., though he too will reach a happy resolution. So, this is what it all comes down to—a tying up of much-dangled loose ends.

Romantic and other dilemmas reach flagged-up conclusions in a novel whose destination is gratification.