When Sy Baumgartner’s wife Anna, née Blume, dies, a decade before this whimsical, clever and at times frustrating novel opens, part of him dies too – though it takes him a quarter of the book to realise it.
The two were married for nearly 40 years. Now Sy is 71 and about to retire from Princeton, where he teaches philosophy. We first meet him one morning while he is busy writing a monograph on Kierkegaard. Before the day ends he is interrupted by a series of freak accidents: he burns his hand on a pan he’s left on the stove, takes a call from his cleaning lady’s daughter, who reports that her father has just severed two of his fingers with a buzz saw, and finally falls down the cellar stairs, damaging his knee. You are reminded of Saul Bellow’s observation in Henderson the Rain King that “truth comes in blows”: felled, Sy recalls that the pan was the very one he was buying when, at 20, he first saw Anna in a hardware store and experienced a coup de foudre. It’s a step on the road to a delayed self-confrontation.
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