Old age is not sexy, conventional wisdom warns. Book buyers are aspirants, not realists. They want pretty tales of pretty, young people they can imagine themselves to be. At 82, Wolitzer deftly defies the ban. Among the skills she employs to accomplish this task: a perspective that only years lived can anoint, and a masterful sense of pacing that mirrors her message, enhancing the tale she’s here to tell in a way that no racing, punk-rock rhythm could.
In the early chapters, which take place months after the excruciating death of Edward’s beloved wife, Bee, grief is the air Edward breathes. He moves slowly through his shrunken life, each step tentative, as if by making himself the “available man’’ of the title, Bee might reach down and snatch him up and take him to where she is - which is where, it is more than implied, he truly wants to be. The narrative moves slowly through these pages, capturing in painful detail the goon squad of grief that hijacks the mourner’s interminable moments and hours and days.
“Edward went into the kitchen and rummaged in what one of the children, in childhood, had aptly dubbed ‘the crazy drawer.’ Among the loose batteries and spare shoelaces, the expired supermarket coupons and the keys that didn’t open any known doors, he found the chain that had briefly kept Bee’s reading glasses conveniently dangling from her neck . . . Now Edward untangled the chain and attached it to his glasses, carefully avoiding his reflection, which he imagined bore an unfortunate resemblance to his third-grade teacher, Miss DuPont.’’
Edward has adult stepchildren who care about him, and so his grieving process, and the narrative’s pace, are hastened by his kids’ determination to get him on the road again by getting him a paramour. Edward resists, believing Bee to be his only-ever other half. Edward reflects, “His own parents had stuck it out, their early passion having metamorphosed into something lower-key but lasting, a soufflé collapsed into a comforting soup of days.’’
