Anita Shreve has been steadily increasing her readership since her first novel was published in 1989. The Weight of Water was shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 1998. Then, in 1999, The Pilot's Wife had the dubious - but undoubtedly lucrative - distinction of being selected by Oprah for her book club.
Shreve's latest novel, which is richer, more jaded and less sentimental than The Pilot's Wife, opens at a writers' festival. Potentially disastrous fictional territory - writers writing about writers talking to other writers - but Shreve pulls it off, her heroine's weary irony and nagging sense of inferiority ("Though something large and subterranean had fuelled her images, she was a minor poet only.") preventing the scene from becoming a closed shop.
From there, the novel unfurls in reverse chronology. The first third of the book takes place at the festival in Toronto, where poets, Thomas Janes and Linda Fallon, meet after not having seen one another in 26 years. The middle section is set in Kenya, where they last met, and where both are briefly living. The final section depicts the two as teenagers, in the throes of first love.
The Toronto episode is extremely well done. Thomas and Linda are adrift in middle age, having reached the point at which "so much of the immediacy of beauty is gone. Muffled." Having known each other as young and brash and exuberantly in love, they are hyper-aware of their lives having mostly passed - time's ravages reflected in one another's faces. Despite their respective successes, they wander in a kind of battered fatigue.
Hints are dropped about a tragic accident that resulted in their being torn apart when young. Thrust, separately, into a succession of marriages both good and not so good, into writing books and rearing children and lamenting one another's absence. "I have always been faithful to you," Linda once wrote. "If faithful means the experience against which everything else has been measured."
The Kenya section is also impressive. (Shreve spent three years there as a magazine journalist.) She has an eye for sensual detail, displaying both an understated horror of the country's grimmer realities and an astonishment in the face of its surreal beauty. Thomas and Linda's status as uncomprehending outsiders reinforces their isolation as (by then) surreptitious lovers. "I see this thing or that thing, and it is as though I watch an exotic, imagistic movie."
The final section, in which the two are teens, is the least effective. As the novel back-pedals through time, and Thomas and Linda shed experiences in a reversal of the accretion that makes people grow more interesting as they age, it loses something. As teenagers, they are an anti-climax, and we know too much about their futures to feel much curiosity.
And then Shreve drops the bombshell. A great sleight of hand in the last lines of a novel is a dubious - and in this case, unnecessary - strategy. Everything that has preceded Shreve's final revelation is retrospectively altered by the disclosure of an ongoing unfaithfulness in a long love affair.
Throughout this novel, Shreve's writing has been solid, reserved, oddly stealthy in that her story gets under the skin. She has managed to turn the commonplace of love thwarted into a compulsive read. In the end, I felt had. Though I can't say it wasn't worth it.
Molly McCloskey is a writer and critic.