Not too late

"The more I find out about your mother's remarkable life before me, the more it emphasizes that I've never done anything adventurous, or traveled, or met anyone that I might have had an impact on ..."

"But you are doing that now. It's not too late."

Phaedra Patrick, The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper

No, Phaedra Patrick's The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper cannot be considered great literature. It is too sentimental, too orchestrated for that. Still it makes great reading.

Her story tells of a 69-year-old man, widowed one year before, who decides the time has come to dispose of his wife's things. He finds something he doesn't remember ever seeing before, a charm bracelet that makes him wonder where Miriam collected those charms and what their significance could have been. Why did she never mention them in 40 years?

Arthur Pepper, a retired locksmith, has always been a quiet, colorless man, even more so in the year since his wife died. He rarely leaves the house, and Bernadette, a neighbor known for adopting lost causes, sometimes has to leave her food offerings at his doorstep because he won't answer her knock.

The charms, however, spur Arthur into action. One in the shape of an elephant has a telephone number on it. He dials that number and reaches a man in India who says Miriam cared for him when he was a small boy. Arthur never knew his wife had been in India. Other charms lead him to Paris, to London, to an art school where Miriam's image still hangs on the wall and even to an estate where tigers roam and where a former playboy still lives. What kind of life did Miriam lead before marrying Arthur? And why did she marry him, of all men, then never tell him about her earlier life? Was she really happy?

The man's journey of exploration, of course, brings him out of his shell and, more than that, affects his ability to relate to other people, including Bernadette and his grown children who, with problems of their own, have become distant. Neither of them even attended their mother's funeral.

Patrick, even when stretching belief, keeps all this not just interesting, but compelling. She answers all of Arthur's questions and leaves him, and her readers, satisfied.