The Way Life Should Be: A Novel

by Christina Baker Kline Narrated by Caitlin Davies

Overview

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Orphan Train, and the critically acclaimed author of Bird in Hand, comes a novel of love, risk, and self-discovery-includes a special PS section featuring insights, interviews, and more.

Angela can feel the clock ticking. She is single in New York City, stuck in a job she doesn't want and a life that seems to have, somehow, just happened. She inherited a flair for Italian cooking from her grandmother, but she never seems to have the time for it-these days, her oven holds only sweaters. Tacked to her office bulletin board is a photo from a magazine of a tidy cottage on the coast of Maine-a charming reminder of a life that could be hers, if she could only muster the courage to go after it.

On a hope and a chance, Angela decides to pack it all up and move to Maine, finding the nudge she needs in the dating profile of a handsome sailor who loves dogs and Italian food. But her new home isn't quite matching up with the fantasy. Far from everything familiar, Angela begins to rebuild her life from the ground up. Working at a local coffeehouse, she begins to discover the pleasures and secrets of her new small-town community and, in the process, realizes there's really no such thing as the way life should be.

This literary novel is a great gift for book club members who love American fiction and want to discover what the way life should be.

HarperCollins 2024

Editorial Reviews

Kirkus Reviews

A New Yorker moves to Maine in the latest from Kline (Desire Lines, 1999, etc.). As she approaches her mid-30s, Angela Russo is finding her life less than satisfying. True, she successfully made the move from Nutley, N.J., to Manhattan after college, but she hasn't done much since. Her job as an events planner for an art museum has become routine, and she hasn't had a proper romance in quite some time. She loves to cook, but she long ago ceased to bother, and she daydreams about leaving the big city behind for an adorable cottage on the coast of Maine. Everything changes, though, when she clicks on a banner ad for a dating service and discovers a pleasingly disheveled, blue-eyed blond who calls himself "MaineCatch." Flirtation by e-mail and phone ensues, and Angela neglects the other areas of her life as she pursues this new dalliance. Her distraction culminates in disaster-she hires a mentally unbalanced fire-eater for a museum gala and fails to buy supplemental fire insurance. Subsequently left jobless, she decides to take a chance on love. She gives up her apartment, puts most of her stuff in storage and moves to Maine, where she discovers that MaineCatch is not quite the rustic Renaissance man she'd been imagining. He does not, for example, live in the seaside cottage of her fantasies, but, rather, in an alarmingly charmless condo in a barren new subdivision, and Angela quickly realizes that he was not being clever or ironic when he sent her this haiku: "Soon you'll be coming / We'll have lots of sex I hope / My bed is king size." MaineCatch, it turns out, is not just a philistine, but also a bit of a bounder. Realizing this, Angela finds herself alone in Maine. Never fear: She makesfriends, rediscovers her love of cooking and, by novel's end, finds herself on the brink of a new, better romance. Earnestly unoriginal. Agent: Beth Vesel/Beth Vesel Literary Agency

From the Publisher

Kline has a perfect sense of character and timing.” — Publishers Weekly

“[Christina Baker Kline] is not only a deft and snappy writer, but a true cartographer of the human heart.” — Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of The Deep End of the Ocean and Still Summer

“A book about love and disappointment and risk and risotto, utterly appealing on every level.” — Lauren Fox, author of Still Life with Husband

“A story about the way life really can be, with a little bit of luck and just the right seasoning.” — Dani Shapiro

“An unassumingly beautiful story of human relationships and self-discovery...the ideal page-turning light read, with a tremendous payoff.” — People

Dani Shapiro

A story about the way life really can be, with a little bit of luck and just the right seasoning.

People

An unassumingly beautiful story of human relationships and self-discovery...the ideal page-turning light read, with a tremendous payoff.

Jacquelyn Mitchard

[Christina Baker Kline] is not only a deft and snappy writer, but a true cartographer of the human heart.

Lauren Fox

A book about love and disappointment and risk and risotto, utterly appealing on every level.

People Magazine

"An unassumingly beautiful story of human relationships and self-discovery...the ideal page-turning light read, with a tremendous payoff."

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170325740
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	03/31/2015
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

The Way Life Should Be

Chapter One

After college I wanted to apply to culinary school, but my father, who is an accountant, objected. "Cooking isn't a real job," he said.

"Too much hard work," my stepmother chimed in. "Terrible hours. Take my advice, Angela: Get a normal job where you can leave at five. You'll thank me when you have children."

"Nonsense. Carpe diem!" my mother exclaimed long-distance, but I wasn't inclined to take her advice. When she ran off with Murray Singer, she didn't just leave my father, she abandoned my brother and me. I overheard the arguments before she left—she needed a clean break, she wasn't emotionally equipped to deal with needy children, my father had always been the better parent anyway. She and Murray moved across the country to Portland, Oregon, and I only saw her three times before, in my midtwenties, she was killed in a car accident. My brother and I flew out to the funeral, but it was hard to feel much for a woman who had written us out of her life fifteen years earlier, when we needed her most.

So after college I moved to New York City with Lindsay, my best friend from high school. We rented an apartment near the river on the Upper East Side and did temp work at consulting firms while looking for normal jobs where we could leave at five. I cast a wide net for positions available to liberal arts majors with no discernible skills except the ability to make lists, follow directions, and look fairly presentable. As in a game of musical chairs, the music stopped at event planning, and I sat down.

For the past five years I've been planning events at the Hunts-worth Museum, amodish showcase for contemporary art in lower Manhattan. While I like some things about my job—the long-term planning combined with last-minute urgencies, the immediate gratification of momentary accomplishment, the blinking red light on my phone and the jaunty sherbet pop-up Post-its in a little box on my desk—I also have to admit that it's no longer much of a challenge. For the first few years the learning curve was steep, but now my days are spent gliding across a smooth plateau of predictability. I can't erase the nagging sense that there's something else out there for me, if only I knew which direction to take.

It's midmorning and I'm sitting at my desk sipping my second cup of coffee, researching novelty circus acts online. My big project at the moment is a black-tie gala four weeks from now, a benefit for a new wing of avant-garde art featuring the works of the French artist Zoë Devereux. Mary Quince, the curator and my boss, has said only that she wants "color, pizzazz, an element of the outrageous." My idea is to stage an evening that animates figures from Zoë Devereux's paintings—circus and carnival performers, acrobats and fire-eaters and jugglers.

Mimes, jesters, clowns, you name it, apparently they're all for hire, à la carte or as a group. I print out a selection of options to discuss with Mary and start e-mailing several of the acts to see if they're available to perform on September 19. As I'm tapping out an e-mail, my glance strays to the small ad at the bottom right of the screen:

Looking for Your Love Match: Do Soul Mates Exist?

My finger hesitates for a moment over the mouse, and then I click on thetiny blue typeface.

I have found that the biggest moments in life, the ones that change everything, usually catch you by surprise. You might not even recognize them as they happen. Your finger is straying over the mouse and you click on the icon and suddenly you find yourself at the portal of a website—an embarrassingly named website, one that makes you wince: kissandtell.com.

Now why would you ever be drawn to such a place? More important, why would you linger?

A few days ago, during our usual Monday morning check-in, I told Lindsay about the abysmal blind date I'd been on the Saturday night before, and then waited to hear the details of hers.

"Well," Lindsay said, "it wasn't, actually."

"Wasn't what?"

"Abysmal. Believe it or not."

Riffling through the cluttered filing cabinet of my brain, I retrieved a scrap of memory: Lindsay joined an online dating service about a month ago. An amateur photographer took her picture. The resulting image, an off-the-shoulder embarrassment in soft focus, provoked a deluge of responses, mostly from shady guys on Long Island. "Don't tell me—it's Hot4U," I joked.

Lindsay laughed uncomfortably. It was clear she regretted sharing this detail. "Actually, it is," she said. "But the name is tongue-in-cheek. You know, an ironic commentary on the whole online-dating thing."

"I see," I said dubiously.

She sighed. "This guy is so great, Ange. So cute, so nice. So smart. I don't know. This is going to sound crazy, but I think maybe I've found my soul mate."

"Are you kidding? It's—pretty soon to be talking soul mates, isn't it, Linz?"

"Iknow!" she said. "Aren't you happy for me?"

That night, after a dinner of four warm Krispy Kremes straight from the bag, I climbed into a sudsy bath and closed my eyes. How many people, I wondered, can actually claim to have found their soul mate, the one person in the world destiny has set aside for them? Not many, I'd bet. I'm skeptical that there is such a thing. I'm inclined to believe that the whole concept of a soul mate is like Sasquatch, the giant hairy ape-man of legend who turned out to be nothing more than a guy in a monkey suit running through a forest.

But now, sitting at my desk, I think—if Lindsay believes she's actually found her soul mate, who am I to scoff and ridicule?

When you read the Sunday wedding section—the women's sports page, as Lindsay calls it—to see . . .

The Way Life Should Be. Copyright ? by Christina Kline. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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