Landline by Rainbow RowellSt. Martin’s Press, 2014

Landline was a fun, quick, funny read for me: I finished it in one delicious Saturday, and kept interrupting my boyfriend’s TV-watching to read him parts I liked. The book is the story of a marriage having a rough patch, or maybe it’s been having a rough patch for a while. Georgie McCool is in her late 30s, and she’s a television writer; she’s married to Neal, who is a stay-at-home dad who takes care of their daughters, who are seven and four. At the start of the book, Georgie comes home from work late, like she often does, and Neal heats dinner for her, like he often does, only on this particular night, Georgie has big news: a network might be picking up the show that she and her writing partner have been working on for years, but the catch is that they have a meeting on December 27, in ten days, and they have to write four episodes before then. Neal is not thrilled: they’d all been planning to go to his mom’s house in Omaha for Christmas. “I thought we could all skip Omaha,” Georgie says (5). But Neal isn’t having it, and says he’d rather take the kids to Omaha himself, while Georgie stays in LA and works.

As it turns out, though, getting work done with everyone gone is easier said than done. Georgie’s mom (who’s been divorced twice and is now happily married to her third husband) has Georgie’s younger sister Heather call her. “She says your marriage is over, and you need our support,” Heather says (20). But Georgie’s marriage isn’t over, right? But what if it is? Should it be? Georgie can’t seem to reach her husband on his cell phone, and not talking to him is stressing her out: is he avoiding her calls on purpose? She talks to his mom, and to her kids, but she can never get hold of him, except when she calls his mom’s landline from her mom’s landline. But then, bizarrely, Georgie realizes that when she’s talking to Neal on the landline, she’s not talking to him now: she’s talking to him in December, 1998, another time just before Christmas when he went to Omaha and she thought he was leaving her. She doesn’t know how to take this: is she crazy, and is this a hallucination? Is it magic? Is she meant to be fixing something in the past? Christmas 1998 is when Neal proposed to her: is she supposed to make sure he doesn’t? Or, wait, is this the way it’s always been, with future-Georgie talking to past-Neal, in which case, well, maybe the fixing is meant to happen in the present?

The narrative unfolds from December 17-25 in the present (2013), but also includes Georgie thinking back to the past, to when she met Neal in college, to when they started dating, to what things were like at the start of their relationship. This means we get to see what brought them together, and the ways in which they’re good together, and also early intimations of their current tension: at one point Neal tells Georgie he’s “not usually good at wanting things,” and Georgie replies that she’s “extra good at wanting things”: “I want enough for two normal people, at least,” she says (147). There are scenes of the good moments in their marriage, too, including a great bit about Georgie getting plot ideas for her show in the middle of the night, trying to find paper to write them down, and Neal saying he’ll remember them for her, then writing the key points on the steamy mirror when she’s in the shower in the morning.

I like that the charm of this book isn’t all in the love story part of it: there are some really great scenes with Georgie’s pug-obsessed mom, and with Georgie’s eighteen-year-old sister from her mom’s second marriage, and with the pugs themselves, who Georgie says she doesn’t like but clearly kind of does, albeit somewhat grudgingly. And oh, man, lines like this: “Watching a pug run down stairs is a lot like watching a pug fall down stairs” (204).


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