LOSING MR. NORTH

Kagan, author of several smart, grown-up novels (No Good-Byes, 2000, etc.), stumbles with this work on adultery, despite the novelty of taking both the wife and girlfriend’s point of view.

In their unspoken arrangement, Rachel Glass expects Jack North to make the seven-hour drive once each month from his home to hers. During the other three weeks, Jack, a retired Beverly Hills policeman, lives a predictable life as husband to Linda, his wife of 31 years. Rachel knows he’s married, and Linda knows her husband has been having an affair for the past six years, yet the three live a barely palatable lie of omission, each for their own reasons. When Jack once fails to arrive at Rachel’s house at the appointed time, she panics and does the unthinkable—calls Linda. And so the search for Mr. North begins, though there’s little suspense involved: it’s clear from the start that Jack has had an accident of some kind and it’s just a matter of time until his body is found. But the novel plays over the minutia of his double life—or, more pointedly, over the consequences of adultery on the two women involved. An independent, urbane mother of two grown children, Rachel admits she’s too smart to play the role of the other woman, but love has no logic. Likewise, Linda, devoted to Jack, struggles silently with the habitual lies she must tell her daughters when they ask where their father has gone. The one pivotal scene, when the two women finally confront each other, comes at story's end, too late to be gratifying and making the reader wonder why more of the novel wasn’t filled with such edgy, vibrant stuff. Kagan is unafraid to face hard questions about the human heart, but she creates something here too emotionally repetitious to be successful, especially in this plot’s small scope.

Certainly better than much that’s out there, though not one of the author’s best.