Rachel Reviews: Where or When by Anita Shreve

I read Anita Shreve now with a bittersweet-ness born of the knowledge that there is only a finite amount of her books left to read and that I know that it will be a powerful read that I will thoroughly enjoy. And such was the case with Where or When and as always, the anticipation of more, like the pile of her unread novels, is diminished on its completion.

The story revolves around two main characters:

Charles Callahan is a real estate and insurance broker in a small seaside town in Rhode Island. He has a wife and three kids and his life is hard, due in no small measure to the economic climate and the pinch felt by everyone as a result.

Siân Richards is a lecturer and poet who is married to an onion farmer and has a daughter. The book starts at the launch of the publication of a collection of Siân's poetry. It is the publicity for this book which Charles reads in his Sunday paper that is the catalyst that causes Siân and Charles to meet up and creates the ensuing love story.

Shreve is a great writer. I don't think that I have ever had to "get into" one of her books at all: I start to read it and a known rhythm is followed to the end. Her stories are well wrought and her characters clearly formed. Dialogue feels real and the feelings that her stories evoke are deep. I have been known to cry at the culmination of her novels although surprisingly, I didn't with this one, despite being moved.

What Shreve's story is essentially about is two people who have settled, and by that I mean that their spouses are people they have selected, believing them to be in love with them. They have created lives with these partners and are tangled into an existence where they meet expectations and live within the routines created by the roles they have assumed. Neither Siân or Charles are happy but this is brought into focus more for Charles because of his dire financial position: he is in danger of losing his business and his home and so there is a sense that he has less to lose as he is on the brink of losing virtually everything anyway. He has a more reckless quality which adds fuel to his motivations and he is the driver in establishing contact.

What ensues is a correspondence, tentative at first but growing stronger until it culminates in a meeting and love rekindled. Shreve's narrative is crafted from multiple voices: Siân's thoughts and events are told in the first person whereas Charles's are told in third person but both are just as revealing and candid. We are also provided with flashbacks to the time where they first meet as teenagers and we have glimpses of the week they spent together at camp and the intensity of that experience.

The atmosphere is tense throughout. The encroaching financial trouble for Charles is present and permeates the text, making it feel gloomy and without hope and I think this is deliberate as a way to create sympathy for Siân and Charles and what could be seen as their reckless behaviour.

However, both characters are not unaware of the impact of their actions. They are depicted as very human with needs and wants, driven by the feeling of rightness between them but also because their lives lack content, colour even, and the passion that they share for each other provides them with a small temporary piece of that.

I'm not going to tell you how it ends but I'm guessing that you will probably have already predicted that it is not happy. But I think it would have been trite to give such a serious and adult book a fairytale ending. Life is complicated and Shreve shows that unabashedly in this novel.

One more thing to add is that it reminded me of The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller which was such a beautiful book, which did move me to tears and which I would also thoroughly recommend.

Rachel Rating: 4/5 stars

Parts of this review have previously been published on my bookshelf at Reedsy Discovery here:

Thanks for stopping by. If you have read the book, please let me know your thoughts on your reading of it. And, of course, if you've read this review, please do leave a comment as I love to interact with my readers.