Towards the finish of Mameve Medwed's new novel, the narrator, Abby, asks: "Can you ever know anybody?" It's a particularly germaine question for her; up to this juncture in the course of her life, numerous people whom she should know well reveal themselves to be not at all who she thinks they are. Person after person confounds her; a lot of the action is driven by Abby's consistent inability to see what people really want, what really motivates their behavior, what turns them on and off. There's an innocence about her—a naïveté, if you will, that is partially responsible for this; but, upon reflection, we see that it also involves the simple fact that each of us often puts unique spins on the different parts of our lives, and that we must adjust to this trait in others just as they must adjust to it in us. For example, at one point, Abby tells us that a nice feature of one of her relationships was the ability of a lover to "attack the cockroaches in the silverware drawer"(!). This is the mark of a truly perceptive writer—to introduce an idiosyncrasy so totally original yet immediately believable. I feel certain that many readers will recognize strands of their own lives' journeys to maturity and adulthood while reading Abby's.

It would be very tempting for the author of a novel such as this—at its foundations, it's really a love story—to resort to schmaltz or sentimentality, but Medwed never does. The reader always knows that Abby is misjudging people and things, making mistakes, seeing things with limited perspective; but, throughout the story, she gains a great deal of wisdom. As we travel alongside her, it's almost like watching a closed bud open and blossom into a beautiful flower. And a large part of her charm is that she's not naïve or innocent about everything, just some things. Culturally, for example, she's tuned in to the older, more classic things like the works of e.e. cummings, as well as modern offerings (i.e. an artist popping six hundred square feet of Bubble Wrap and Memoirs of a Geisha). This is a woman who has grounding in the large world beyond her small native part of it.

Her small native part, by the way, is Cambridge, Massachusetts. Abby is a native of Cambridge, of the lifestyle called "the Harvard thing", which she both loves and hates. As we meet her, she's been going through some changes: a breakup, the death of her mother and a friend in an earthquake in India, her father's marrying one of his graduate students (named Kiki) and moving to California a little too soon after his wife's departure. She makes her living as an antiques merchant with a booth in a mart called Objects of Desire. On a slow Monday, her colleague Gus happens to notice a chamber pot in Abby's booth; he suggests that it might be valuable and encourages her to take it to the tryouts for the TV program "Antiques Roadshow". She does, and gets chosen for the program when it turns out it can be authenticated that the pot once belonged to Elizabeth Barrett Browning. This is where the fun begins. The scene in which Gus discovers the pot contains a nifty irony. Knowing that Abby is depressed over her lover Clyde's recent betrayal and departure, he comments on "That son of a bitch who doesn't know a priceless object when he sees it", referring to Abby as a priceless object. However, this exact observation could be applied to Abby, herself, being that a pot which belonged to Elizabeth Barrett Browning has been in her family for years and she didn't know it. As we'll see, this is a metaphor for not picking up on truths about people, even when all the signs are right under her nose.

The pot is appraised at seventy-five thousand dollars. Abby becomes quite well known among collectors because the show is endlessly repeated on TV, and her business improves as a result. The plot thickens when Abby gets a letter from a Mr. Snodgrass, the attorney for a brother and sister named Lavinia and Ned. Here, background and exposition become very important.

Abby's family and that of Ned and Lavinia have been friendly for many years. The three grew up together. At some point, Abby's mother and Henrietta (Ned and Lavinia's mom) became domestic partners. Abby and Ned cultivate the romance which it has been their destiny to pursue, but it falls apart when Ned writes a novel—a blatant roman à clef that's greatly insensitive to his lover.

Abby, deeply wounded, eliminates him from her life, and he goes off to New York where he takes up with a Columbia professor. In the meantime, it's Lavinia who orchestrates a legal scheme to get the poet's pot (as well as virtually everything else) away from Abby on the grounds that it was more her mother's property than Abby's mother's. (Lavinia's entire aura is summed up in one sentence: "She was working as a thinker for a think tank out near MIT.") A deposition is set for six weeks hence; Abby enlists another girlhood friend, Mary Agnes Finch, as her attorney. Mary Agnes minces no words in letting Abby know how she feels about taking the case: "I must say that the logistics have been a nightmare, for such a little case." A reporter for The Boston Globe, Todd Tucker, calls and says he wants to do a story on Abby and the chamber pot, her TV appearance, the works. Here, Abby makes another huge misjudgment, thinking Todd's seduction of her is genuine when it's, in fact, just a means to get juicy information out of her. However, there is serendipity in her encounter with Todd Tucker; on their antiquing excursion, she finds another old and valuable piece, one once belonging to King George! Finally, there's Abby's most recent ex, the lummox Clyde, who contacts her to meet for a thoroughly New Age apology session, that Medwed handles brilliantly. It's simultaneously piercing and funny.

As a result of his having to come to Cambridge for the deposition, Ned and Abby reconsider and reconcile. Not without a price, but they reconcile, and the implication is that they live happily ever after. At the end, Abby is able to see many things with a lucidity and clarity she previously lacked.

This is a novel about a few different things—relationships, memory, the relationship between the past and the present, trust, gaining wisdom through experience, and the long-lasting bonds that sustain or do not sustain friends and lovers over time. It also has, as one of its central concerns, the worth of objects and why human beings consider certain artifacts to have huge monetary value. These are all issues directly addressed in the novel either by the author or by the characters and, in particular, I'd like to look at the relationships between Abby and various others, in a moment. But there is another motif which arises without really being explicitly discussed, and this is what you might call The Big Event which occurs in people's lives. No one, here, seems to have a relatively quiet, ordinary existence; people perish in earthquakes on the other side of the world, have their first novel published (and universally panned) by big New York publishers, run off to La Jolla with a wife forty years younger, take their lifelong friends to court, accidentally stumble across rare possessions from centuries gone by. They're caught up in extraordinary circumstances in which most of us can't imagine being involved. The Big Outward Events mirror the emotions inside.

In the beginning of the novel, Abby takes the Boston subway to the TV studio, struggling to carry the chamber pot up the stairs. A young man offers to help; she turns down the offer, saying she can manage, which is not true. She's been done so wrong by men that she now refuses to get involved, even at this superficial level, as if rebuking the young fellow's offer of help says to all men, "I don't need you." Just how badly she's been treated is illustrated in the one real-time scene she has with Clyde. They meet for coffee. He just can't get it right—Abby notes, "I smell too much cologne. I turn my head." He informs her that he's on a journey of making amends, of apologizing to everyone he's ever wronged so that he may wipe his spirit clean. This is a gorgeous send-up of New Age spiritual thinking and self-improvement techniques practiced incorrectly. Clyde goes on to recite a list of things for which he's sorry, including:

And on and on and on, some of the apologies being much worse than these. While we laugh hysterically at this buffoon, we also feel sorry for Abby, sorry that she didn't know this idiot was doing all these things to her! Her good faith, her honest belief, was horribly betrayed.

Her essential goodness as a person is also demonstrated in the scenes where, in flashback, she tells of her young love with Ned and the day he finally fininshed his novel, titled The Cambridge Ladies Who Live in Furnished Souls after the poem by e.e. cummings. Let's see:

Her insincere seduction by Todd Tucker soon follows this episode, making three times within barely eighty pages that we witness her heart being broken. But her will to go on, bolstered by her ultimate faith in the goodness of things, ultimately carries the day.

I should like to point out, too, that this novel is a goldmine for students of certain concepts in feminist literary theory, such as that of "man made language", popularized by Dale Spender in her book of that name, and of concepts in lesbian/gay literary theory such as that of the "lesbian continuum", introduced by Adrienne Rich in her book Blood, Bread, and Poetry. These investigations are a little beyond our scope, here, but well worth looking into for those so inclined.

Finally, a couple of observations that come from Abby's childhood. The first concerns a toy store named Irving's. When the neighborhood kids go there, with their parents in accompaniment, the proprietors, Irving and his wife Doris, are polite, friendly and courteous. Little does Abby know! One day, she's sent back, alone, with a broken toy. This is what she gets:

This is an important moment because it shows us that, even with this early childhood exposure to how two-faced people can be, Abby still grows up trusting and gullible.

The second is more positive. While they are still young children, Ned teaches Abby how to ride a bike. 'So what?' you may ask, but by the end of the story we see that this is a telegraph move on Medwed's part, and one only understood in retrospect, once we have read the entire book. It makes a nice point about being true to one's nature and the continuity of the self over time. Look for it as you read.

It's not easy to make a comprehensive list of the pleasures of reading How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Save My Life; there are many. I've barely scratched the surface, here. Just be confident that it's a ride of self-discovery which discerning readers of fiction will not want to miss.

Mameve Medwed was gracious enough to answer a few quick questions for us: