The Way Life Should Be

By Christina Baker Kline

William Morrow, September 2007

261 pages (plus 12 pages of recipes), $ 24.95

Fiction

When you are a single 30-something Manhattan event planner, and your latest production featured a fire-eater run amok resulting in millions in art museum damages, the result should be disastrous. But for Angela Russo, who was already simmering with restlessness, her career flame-out is more propitious than fatal. In the weeks before the fiasco, spurred by forces even she can't understand, Angela had uncharacteristically tossed a line into the promising and murky waters of online matchmaking. Now, with her career extinguished, why not jump?

Suspicious even of her own expectations, but intrigued by what she interprets as a heartfelt invitation from a blustery Maine hunk, Angela puts her belongings and life into storage and heads north. Leaving behind a best friend, her New Jersey roots, and a beloved and aging Nonna, Angela is convinced that Maine-- and the handsome, wind-tossed, Haiku-writing hottie-- is where she should be.

Author Christina Baker Kline (whose previous novels are Desire Lines and Sweet Water) writes with grace and empathy. Her prose is languorously readable and she infuses her character's internal landscapes with just enough insight to be satisfying, absent any overwrought soul-wrenching pathos.

As Angela learns the truth about her Maine man, she makes just as many discoveries about herself and what it will take to make a life she loves. This, she finds, does not necessarily involve having everything that will make her happy, but instead-- like the recipes she shares with new friends-- is more about having enough good ingredients within reach and then combining with equal rashers of practice and intuition.

The Way Life Should Be packs an extra bonus for anyone interested in the transformative power of cooking, sharing meals, and recreating family recipes. By recalling the times in her life when she felt most loved-- sitting at her Nonna's oilcloth-covered kitchen table in Nutley, NJ-- and finally acknowledging what Nonna has always maintained was Angela's inborn culinary gift, Angela surprises even herself with her new passions.

Alone on a sparsely populated touristy island in early winter, Angela does the one thing that's worked for her all of her life: She sits down at a table, food and drink in hand, and makes conversation with the only other soul handy. In this case, it's the gay café owner, also a displaced searcher "from away," who landed in Maine looking for love. Kline avoids making him, and the other half-dozen stragglers Angela gathers for cooking classes and intimate conversations, into predictable stock characters, by assigning each an unexpected history and believable dialogue.

As she navigates a new life, Angela makes enough missteps to keep readers engaged and turning pages. Kline smoothly folds the Maine story into events back in New Jersey, and a return trip for an important revelatory talk with an ailing Nonna.  The recipes and kitchen wisdoms provide not only Angela, but her new entourage, with a map to endings savory but not too sweet.

With a liberal pinch of humor, a generous helping of languid Maine-isms, and a peppering of earnest but never tedious purposefulness, Kline and her characters create a pleasing and well-balanced literary meal. Buon apetit. 

Click here to buy the book.

Lisa Romeo's essays and other nonfiction has been published in the New York Times, literary journals, and two recent anthologies, and her poetry has appeared in Literary Mama and the Bad Mother Chronicles. She lives in the New York metropolitan area with her husband and two sons, and is finishing an MFA degree in creative nonfiction through the Stonecoast program at the University of Southern Maine.

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