A Trip to a Land of Dreams and Heartbreak

Since life is often harsh or dull or both, fiction based on fantasy will always find an audience. Take the story--which became a Major Motion Picture--of a handsome hunk out photographing bridges who has a tryst with a yearning farm wife, no messy consequences attached. Or this one by Elizabeth Richards, “Every Day”--soon to be another Major Motion Picture--about a yearning suburban wife trysting with an old flame who once dumped her but now needs her because he’s suffering from a horrible disease.

Short on analysis, long on brimming eyes and pounding hearts, such books ask you to give up your brain, your judgment and your sense of humor in return for a trip to dreamland. As if the price weren’t high enough, Richards, a first-time novelist, makes you travel in irritating company.

Her narrator, writer Leigh Adelman, is a mother of three and wife of Simon, a nice but plodding guy who installs computer systems for a living. It’s not that Leigh is bored exactly, or she doesn’t know she is until one day, after a 14-year silence, a postcard arrives from him, the man who got her pregnant when she was a high school student and then vamoosed: It is simply signed “Fowler.” No first name needed for these manly types, and few conversational skills.

When he sees her again, he says only, “Leigh,” softly, and grips her hand. Leigh’s reaction? “I shut my eyes to the heartbreak of his face because I know, without his saying another word, that he’s dying.”

What’s a trembling girl to do? Fall into bed with him, of course. Long ago, when she was a teen and Fowler was her English teacher, he was “unsufferably handsome, with finger-combed streaky blond hair and dark eyes.” His hair is whiter now, he walks with a cane, but she still goes limp around him and thinks thoughts like, “Unforeseeable things do happen . . .” and “You know that this very admission, that you’re in love again, with the wrong person, will break hearts.”

Here is the crux of the offered fantasy: The cad returns, begging for mercy (and soon to wind up in a wheelchair, completely in Leigh’s power), and the lives of four more people--her family--are blown apart by the woman they took for granted until now.

The first to hit the roof after Leigh’s initial “long lunch” with Fowler is Simon, a wimp maybe but not a fool. “I cannot live with a liar,” he announces and stomps upstairs to pack.

The kids are next. When Simon returns, after a week away, and makes a scene in front of the family (“Something has happened in our life . . .”), 14-year-old Isaac slams out. Then Leigh herself leaves, taking the baby to her mother’s, and, shortly afterward, Jane, the 8-year-old, calls her a “slut.”

Meanwhile Leigh, a self-confessed drama addict who panics when her life gets too bland, tells everyone who will listen the gory details. She buttonholes a librarian, visits her best friend and unloads on her parents, who live separately and thus must be told separately, and it’s hard not to conclude that she’s enjoying every minute. But as each member of her personal audience hears the tale for the first time, we, her larger audience, must endure it over and over with little variation or insight. Leigh, supposedly smart enough to write popular history books, has no ability to analyze her own life. When her husband and children express outrage over her affair with a despicable man (who never emerges as more than a vague cliche), she simply throws herself on the floor and cries.

Nevertheless, during the course of the story, she gets everything she wants: an avid lover, her husband and kids back (and 100% supportive of her), a better job and kudos from Fowler’s haughty parents for all she’s done for their son in his last days.

OK, yes, Fowler does die, but not before making it clear that he’s always loved Leigh despite those 14 years with nary a phone call--and what can she do but believe him? This isn’t everyday life, after all, it’s “Every Day,” and there’s a world of difference between the two.