Conflict of Laws

Heart of the Matter

Emily Giffin

I still have one exam to go before I am done with law school forever, but I couldn't resist buying Emily Giffin's latest when it came out yesterday. And then reading it in one fell swoop, even though there were other things I should have been doing with my time. ("Dear Connie. I am your Public Health law paper. PLEASE COME BACK TO ME, I AM DUE TOMORROW.")

But as I explained in this post, I have a soft spot for Emily Giffin, though her last two books (Baby Proof and Love the One You're With) weren't quite as great as I would have hoped. Even Something Blue, her follow-up to Something Borrowed, was weaker than the first, I thought, but I just chalked that up to the fact that Giffin was faced with the difficult task of trying to make an unsympathetic character sympathetic. And to the fact that Giffin (a lawyer herself!) is a lot smarter than loopy Darcy Rhone. It's harder to write stupid than you'd think.

I didn't expect great things from Heart of the Matter, but honestly, with my brain the porridgey consistency it is right now, that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. Even so, it was a pleasant surprise to find that Giffin got her game back! This is her first really emotionally complex book since her first.

Coincidentally, it's also Giffin's third book to deal with the thorny topic of infidelity, and the one that most closely resembles the plot of her bestselling debut. Tessa Thaler (sister of Dex from Something Borrowed) is a new stay-at-home mother who is concerned with getting everything right. Valerie Anderson is a single working mother whose son Charlie is burned in a horrible accident. What do the two women have in common? Tessa's husband, Nick Russo, is Charlie's surgeon. As Nick spends more and more time with his patient, he grows closer to Valerie, and distant from Tessa, until the two women share Nick in a Biblical way, if you know what I'm sayin'. And I think you do.

Oops.

The novel alternates between Valerie's and Tessa's points of view to show how difficult an adulterous situation can be: there's not necessarily one right or wrong party. Things are more complicated than that. Except not really: we get a first person narration from Tessa, and a limited third person from Valerie, which (if you were never an English major) is a privileging of one character over the other and a clear sign of who we are supposed to side with in this story. There's never really a doubt about Valerie's other woman status--hell, even Valerie knows she's doing something awful and fucked up. But it is a little more interesting and complex than, say, Olivia Goldsmith's Young Wives, which paints every chippie on the side as an evil, callous, snooty, soulless ho-bag (and which I just re-read: I told you my brain is maxed out. It was like reading Proust, y'all.)

But Heart of the Matter works because Giffin is so comfortable in the gray areas of life. I truly believe it is the lawyer in her. At one point, she spent thousands of dollars and three years learning to see messy situations from both sides. Despite the fact that Tessa is our main gal here, I did find myself at times rooting for Valerie, though I knew I shouldn't, and felt disloyal in so doing. But Giffin gives us just enough of each woman's life for us to find ourselves in her. When we watch Tessa scrambling in the middle of the night to put together a healthy, nutritious snack for her daughter's preschool lunch the next day (one that will impress the other moms with her Super-Momness, natch) we can't help but feel pangs of sympathy for her, and hope she does show them. But then we see Valerie blowing her entire bonus on luxurious bath towels, sheets, and fine china, things that she missed out on getting, because she was never married to her child's father--well, there's something heart-stirring in that, too. Giffin is so great at this. She owns the gray areas.

Giffin is not, however, so comfortable in the clear-cut places. The places of great despair or great fury: they belong to other writers. Jennifer Weiner or Anna Maxted can make the hard stuff work. It's their forte. But I feel like the darkness is a little bit outside of Giffin's comfort zone. When she has to make a clear decision one way or the other, and venture out of the shadows, she is not as successful. There is a tendency to oversimplify, to equivocate, to take the easy way out. This means that the last quarter of the book is perhaps not as strong as the first three.

But luckily, that means the bulk of the story's action takes place in murky Giffin territory. The result is chick-lit that requires a brain, a fast-paced, morally-ambiguous, topical tale that requires you to run through pretty much every set of conflicting emotions you've got in your arsenal: anger and understanding, grief and love, pain and joy.

Rating: 4 of 5 stars