I felt at a disadvantage upon beginning “Goodbye, Earl” (Simon & Schuster, 368 pages, $24). I’d never read anything by author Jo-Ann Mapson, including the previous two books in the trilogy that “Earl” completes. This surprised an acquaintance who knew how much I like the work of Pam Houston.
“You’ll love her, then,” she told me about Mapson. “Same thing.”
Same thing, in that the fiction of each could be described as belonging to the genre rather dismissively called Chick Lit, in a special subset I’d call Rugged Western Division. (Both authors write about strong women who make dumb decisions, mostly about men, and both set their stories in the West, using animals and nature to offer insight into human character.)
But that’s like saying John le Carre and Tom Clancy are the same just because they both write about spies.
Mapson stands on her own, thank you. And, luckily, it doesn’t matter if you’ve read “Bad Girl Creek,” which introduced readers to the core characters of Phoebe, Ness, Nance and Beryl, or its follow-up, “Along Came Mary.”
“Earl” begins five years after the original book. Phoebe is still living at the California flower farm she inherited from her wise Aunt Sadie, raising her 5-year-old daughter without the girl’s father, who died on their wedding day, and cautiously beginning a new romance. Former roommate Nance has married Phoebe’s brother and is trying desperately to have a baby. Third roommate Ness has secretly married her gay best friend, who is dying of AIDS, and wondering how she is going to live without the person who has loved her the most purely.
And Beryl, whose story this really is, is living in Alaska, where she has just realized the love of her life, Earl, is going to dump her. When he goes missing instead, failing to come back from a short hike, Beryl holes up in her house. As she tries to figure out what went wrong, and what really happened to Earl, she embarks on a tenuous new relationship, re-examining her tragic past in the process. She knows what would really help — to draw on the strength of her three friends — but she can’t bring herself to tell them that another relationship has failed.
Summed up so simply, this sounds like the plot of a Lifetime movie. But it transcends that, in part because Mapson’s writing style is engaging and deceptively casual; the dialogue, in particular, sounds like conversations you could imagine having yourself, or overhearing in a coffeehouse. And the characters seem as real as your best friend from college or members of your book club. Mapson may skate toward cliche with the strong women/foolish choices motif, but her insights into love and friendship are more original.
The end is bittersweet, partly because you’d like to continue your relationship with these women, and partly because the ending is less satisfying than the rest of the book. Everything is wrapped up a bit too neatly. The mystery of what happened to Earl is solved, but not particularly believably. And one appealing minor character abruptly disappears.