My main complaint about The Beginner's Goodbye is that it it just SO short! I read it in a sitting and really, really didn't want it to end so soon.
The book
tells the story of Aaron whose wife, Dorothy, dies in a tragic accident - but then starts appearing in the oddest places. Because Dorothy is already dead when the story begins, the reader has to form a view on what she might have been like from odd comments
here and there. Aaron, who has disabilities which he refuses to recognise as limiting, loved her because she, too, ignored his handicaps. Which sounds callous, but clearly wasn't as far as Aaron was concerned.
The emptiness which comes with the sudden loss of a partner is put over particularly strongly, especially the difficulty of forming and maintaining relationships when the one person you are closest to is not there anymore. Nandina, Aaron's sister,
is his back-stop and the flowering of her unlikely relationship with the builder hired to rebuild Aaron's shattered house is unexpectedly sweet.
The name of the book derives from the range of self-help
books published by the firm where Aaron works. There is a Beginner's Guide to almost everything, it seems - even, for Aaron, learning to say goodbye to the one person he loved the most. Though, as the story unfolds, he discovers he didn't know as much about
her as he thought. And for us readers, who never knew Dorothy when she was alive, her sudden "appearances" help us form in our minds a complex but strangely likeable character. For Aaron the strange sightings are his second chance
to understand his lost wife - and in learning more about her, he is able to let her go so that he can move on into a new life (though I was a bit surprised at the rather neat ending.)
So,
yes, I enjoyed The Beginner's Goodbye. I just hope Anne Tyler's next book is a little bit longer...