Irrational choices

The heart has no IQ.

In Deborah Meyler’s 2013 novel The Bookstore, Esme Garland is a young British woman studying art history in the Columbia University graduate program. She falls in love with the wrong man, a handsome economist from a wealthy New York family who is demanding, selfish, manipulative, sexually aggressive (as long as he is the one calling the shots), suicidal and maybe worse. Everyone who reads this book will be smart enough to know that Luke, the sensitive young man who works with Esme at the Owl Bookstore, is a better match for her than Mitchell van Leuven. But not Esme, who seems willing to accept any insult, any abuse if only Mitchell will love her. He doesn’t.

For most of the novel she is pregnant with Mitchell’s baby. He abandons her, returns to demand she get an abortion, accepts her decision to have the baby, pushes her toward a quick marriage, abandons her again. In a nutshell that is the story, except that the nutshell ignores the best part of the story, namely Esme’s job at the Owl and her relationships with her fellow employees, mostly men whose consideration for her and her pregnancy is so excessive it becomes comical. Yet these other men, including some homeless ones who hang around the store, demonstrate each working day that there are better men out there are than the depressed and depressing Mitchell.

Like Esme, Meyler is a young British woman with a college degree (hers is from Oxford) who moves to New York City and gets a job at an independent bookstore. So The Bookstore  is autobiographical up to a point. It is beyond that point where she demonstrates her skill as a writer of fiction.

Esme’s choice of Mitchell as a lover and possible husband is not the only illogical choice in the novel. In fact, there are so many that illogical choice becomes the novel’s theme. She chooses to have the baby even though it will interfere with her academic pursuits. The bookstore manager hires her even though he knows her to be pregnant. Some of those homeless men have housing opportunities but prefer to live on the street.

Life is all about choices, and reason isn’t always our guide when we make those choices.